“It’s an honor to be here, playing songs we wrote while we were here,” said Falcone, a 2017 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill, to cheers from the audience.

Falcone sings and plays bass in a band called Blonde Otter, which was the opening act of a special concert, presented by WFUV, that brought the inauguration day festivities to a rollicking close on Friday, October 14.

“Blonde Otter has a unique connection with WFUV and Fordham University—all of the members are Fordham grads recently and [several] of them actually worked at WFUV,” said Alisa Ali, PCS ’14, WFUV’s midday host. Ali created a feature, “NY Slice,” to highlight local New York artists on her show, and two of them—Blonde Otter and Rén with the Mane—were part of the concert. “They offer up a true New York slice of life through their catchy songs.”

Since 2017, Blonde Otter has released three EPs, and last year, the pop rock quintet put out their first full, self-titled, album. Ali said their music examines “the challenges of life through a spirited lens that keeps you moving.”

A Return to Their Roots

For the band members, several of whom met as first-year students in Martyrs’ Court, returning to play at Rose Hill felt like a dream come true.

“Looking at our freshman dorms while [performing] on the steps [of the library] was something else,” Falcone said after the show.

The group had talked about forming a band soon after they became friends, but didn’t have performing space until the 2016–2017 academic year, when they moved off campus to Bathgate Avenue, and Rob’s brother, Matthew Falcone, FCRH ’18, was able to bring his drums to the basement of their new house.

“We always had similar tastes in music as friends, so it kind of fell into place,” said Michael Guariglia, FCRH ’17, the band’s lead singer. “It was always on our minds to try and do something musically together, but once we had the space, that’s when it took off.”

They began playing in basements around Fordham, primarily cover songs at first.

“As we got closer to graduating, we started writing original music and recorded it and started playing out in Manhattan, in Brooklyn,” said Rob Falcone. “And fortunately, the Fordham crowd followed us and we made some other fans by doing that, too.”

The band, which also features lead guitarist Dan Wines, FCRH ’17, and rhythm guitarist Stephen Malichek, GABELLI ’18, competed in the University’s Battle of the Bands competition to open Spring Weekend in 2017. They didn’t win it that year, but Matthew Falcone joked that playing the inauguration show was even better.

“Because we felt like losers,” he said laughing, “and this is a great validation.”

The group credited WFUV, particularly Ali and Russ Borris, the station’s music director, for supporting their work.

Borris was the first to play one of their songs on the air, on The Alternate Side, and then Ali played them on her midday show. Hearing themselves on the radio was “surreal,” the band said, especially since WFUV had been a part of their lives for many years.

“My mom has been a longtime [member of WFUV], even before I went to Fordham, so driving to school in the morning [and] after, WFUV always was on,” Guariglia said, “so it’s a real honor.”

The Falcone brothers and Malichek even worked at the station as undergraduates, with Rob Falcone serving as Ali’s audio editor during his junior year.

From the Big Easy to the Big Apple

The concert also included a set by Rén with the Mane, a Brooklyn-based artist “who makes vibrant pop music with touches of rock and soul,” Ali said, and it featured the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. The group, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary, is known for performing the “inimitable music of their native New Orleans,” according to WFUV’s Eric Holland, and featuring some of the city’s most exciting performers.

Tetlow, who grew up in New Orleans, joked that she was supposed to introduce the legendary headliners, but the band beat her to it. They marched down the Old Elm Road with the horn section playing “I’ll Fly Away,” the gospel classic. As the group reached the Walsh Library stage, the rhythm section joined in and Tetlow, who has sung professionally, added her own soaring voice to the mix, to the delight of the crowd.

After that rousing entrance, Tetlow said she was grateful to WFUV and to all the performers, particularly the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, for helping her “feel at home here at Fordham.”

“We’re here to celebrate 75 years of WFUV, the coolest thing about Fordham University,” she said, describing station’s heritage and national renown as a place for music discovery and a multimedia training ground for students.

Guariglia said he and his bandmates were thrilled to return to campus to be a part of the festivities.

“I haven’t been back in a while, and to be able to come back, playing our own music, it’s a great moment,” he said.

I am honored beyond measure to be entrusted by the Board of Trustees, and all of you, to be here today—the chance to build on the extraordinary work of my 32 predecessors, especially Fr. Joe McShane.

Believe it or not, Fordham has only held two other inauguration ceremonies in almost 200 years. In 1971, for example, Fr. Walsh met Fr. Finlay in the JFK airport parking lot to hand over the keys to the University.

But we gather here today—in such splendor—not for Fr. McShane and me but to properly celebrate Fordham in all of its glory. To tell the story of our history and traditions. To revel in our achievements. And most of all, to dream about the future.

At a moment of darkening clouds in the world, we gather on this bright, shining day to remember that Fordham has such power to make the world a better place.

To create opportunity and transform lives.

To bring together the best and brightest from every corner of the world, and to make them believe—at their core—that they belong here. To spin their dreams and talents into reality.

To teach them, at a time of growing division and distrust, Jesuit discernment—how to listen with open minds and hearts, how to embrace being challenged.

To form them into global citizens, with a deep understanding of the fundamentals of democracy. To send them out with the courage to make the hard moral choices necessary to protect democracy.

And to persuade a cynical world that while we search for truth with humility, truth does, in fact, exist.

If we work ever harder, ever smarter, Fordham will continue to rise to new heights. We will achieve (as we say here) magis. It’s a Latin word that simply means “more,” but to us it means the constant striving to do better—to have raging ambition, not for ourselves but for the mission of God.

In 1841, Archbishop John Hughes struggled to serve the hundreds of thousands of immigrants streaming into New York, so desperate and so determined. He organized food and shelter for them, but he also recognized their deeper hunger—for education and opportunity.

Hughes founded a college on this spot and called it St. John’s.

He did so as an act of hope—because he could see the talent and potential in those desperate people coming off the ships.

And he did so as an act of defiance, against all of those elite American universities turning away our ancestors—those schools so willing to squander the talent of Catholic (and Jewish) immigrants well into the 20th century.

In its first year, St. John’s hired six faculty and recruited three students. Not a very promising start. But Hughes had high ambitions. He asked the religious order most famous for academic excellence—the Jesuits—to take over the University.

It makes me personally very happy that it was the French Jesuits who said yes, many of whom came through New Orleans.

They built this beautiful campus, stone by stone. Students flocked here from New York, and also from the South, Puerto Rico, and Mexico—a vibrant community bonding over the brilliant teaching and terrible food.

And here’s where Fordham’s story begins to intertwine with my own, in ways I just discovered.

Fordham’s president during World War I, Fr. Joseph Mulry, created a graduate school of social services to serve the people of New York, especially the poor.

President Mulry had a nephew determined to become a Jesuit, but who didn’t qualify to join the New York province because he didn’t speak ancient Greek (New York has its standards!). So Louis entered the Southern Province.

Eventually Fr. Louis Mulry became pastor of a Jesuit parish in New Orleans, where in the 1930s, an adoring parishioner asked him if she could name her third child after him. (He must have been pretty flattered.) As he christened the child Louis Mulry Tetlow, I’m sure no one at the baptism imagined this baby boy would someday raise a daughter to become president of Fordham.

I didn’t put the pieces of that puzzle together until the Mulry family emailed me recently, asking me about my father’s name. But it doesn’t surprise me. Like so many of you, my family’s story has intertwined with Jesuit education for generations.

My grandfather became the first Tetlow to escape a life of coal mining and go to college, on a football scholarship from Loyola New Orleans. There he met my grandmother, and they had five children, two of whom became Jesuit priests.

Their oldest, Joseph Tetlow Jr., just celebrated 75 years as a Jesuit. A renowned expert on Ignatian spirituality, Uncle Joe has served in every post you can imagine, including leading the Curia on Spirituality in Rome. He’s still writing remarkable books, and next week he turns 92. He is, quite simply, the wisest and kindest man on the planet, and he’s watching this online if you could all take a moment and cheer for him.

My father, always known by the unusual name of Mulry, served as a Jesuit for 17 years. Never as book-smart as his big brother, never as sure of himself, joining the order was a leap of faith in more ways than one.

But the Jesuits could see his talents. They instilled in him military discipline and hard work. They inspired in him a love of learning which would never waver, a joyful curiosity that would last his whole life.

Jesuit training is no small feat—years of theology and philosophy, back then with oral exams in Latin, and then the most humbling test of all: teaching teenagers in the Jesuit high schools. It was all meant to culminate in a Ph.D. and joining the faculty of a Jesuit university.

In the late 1960s, my father came to Fordham to study psychology. Here he met my mom, a fellow graduate student, who had just finished her master’s in philosophy and was starting a degree in theology. They became friends at daily Mass, celebrated in the chapel of Murray-Weigel Hall, with a vibrant community of students and young faculty.

As they became closer, my father realized he had an agonizing decision to make. He loved being a priest more than I can describe, but he also felt called by God to have a family. To be a good husband and a father who raised his children in devout faith and purpose.

I like to think he made the right choice. But regardless, I hope I’ve made it up to the Jesuits.

My sisters and I received a Jesuit education from birth. Our father sang us to sleep with Gregorian chant. He tried to make us delight in calculus—and failed.

He rejoiced in the beauty of God’s creation. On every walk together he would point to the magnificence of the smallest creatures and quote his favorite Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. “Glory be to God for dappled things.”

For the rest of his life, which ended five years ago, he would call to let us know when the moon was particularly beautiful so we wouldn’t miss it.

My sisters and I grew up without much material privilege but awash in education. Our mother, who is here today, did not believe in relying on translations of the Bible—so full of filters and assumptions—and so she learned Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, Latin, and Greek to read the original.

(And by the way, as a kid, my household theological training did not always endear me to the nuns teaching me religion. Sorry, Sr. Bertille.)

For my sisters and me, Jesuit education meant knowing that the talent God gave us didn’t make us better than anyone else, but it came with great responsibility. We had to work hard, gobble up knowledge, and hone our skills to make the world a better place. And so we have tried to do.

I grew up determined to find a way to matter, as a prosecutor fighting for the victims of crime, particularly those with the least power—and as a law professor at Tulane trying to find the answers to domestic violence, and racism in the criminal justice system.

And yet, something was missing. Next door to Tulane stands Loyola New Orleans, a campus I grew up around as a child and where I went to Mass my whole life, listening to thousands of Jesuit homilies. From Tulane, I used to point across the fence and say, “Actually, those are my people.”

I learned so much about the strategy of higher education as chief of staff to the brilliant president of Tulane. But in many ways, I learned lessons even more valuable from the extraordinary Loyola community—about ingenuity and determination, about passion and utter devotion to students.

For almost 500 years, passion and ingenuity have been essential traits of Jesuit universities.

Education was never supposed to be the point when Ignatius founded the Jesuit order with a few of his friends from the University of Paris. They wanted to become missionaries spreading the Gospel around the world, not tied down to the administration of schools.

But Ignatius had an unusual idea—to create schools so excellent that they would attract the children of the elite but also be affordable to all. In the beginning, he banned the charging of any tuition at all. (You may have just noticed a groan from all of the other presidents here.)

That honorable struggle—how to make academic excellence truly affordable to every talented student, regardless of wealth—is one the Jesuits have grappled with for centuries. When some of the kings of Europe later suppressed the Jesuit order and plundered their great universities, they expected to find piles of gold. Instead, they found piles of debt.

Our work is not easy. But that’s because it matters so much.

The Jesuits continued to build schools at a remarkable pace, because of that passion and ingenuity. By the 1700s, they ran 700 institutions on five continents, helping to create higher education as we know it.

The Jesuits taught students the principles of discernment—how to seek answers to complicated problems with openness and humility. Long before modern psychology, they taught self-awareness, the willingness to be challenged and proved wrong. To learn, and live, in the spirit.

And in an era when the relationship between faith and reason was fraught, the Jesuits took a stand for both. They proclaimed the gospel of finding God in all things, especially in human reason. They believed that education doesn’t dilute our faith, it fuels it. That God intends for us to understand creation through science and math and art.

The Jesuits did the proud work of the faculty today, fearlessly pushing on the boundaries of human knowledge and grappling with the deepest meanings of human expression. There are 35 craters on the moon named after Jesuit astronomers. A Jesuit created a written alphabet for the Vietnamese language.

They were explorers and cartographers, they learned languages and—more importantly—culture wherever they went. They spread ideas to and from every region of the world.

Ignatius believed that education fuels faith, but more importantly, that education fuels action rooted in faith—because the point of God’s gift of free will is that all of us must fight for justice, serve the poor, and welcome the stranger. As Ignatius insisted, “In God’s eyes, our words have only the value of our actions.”

Within Catholic tradition, there are many models of service, including goodness rooted in purity, in monastic seclusion from the wicked world. The Jesuits chose the riskier path—to engage, to push to make the world better.

It often got them in a great deal of trouble, sometimes because of missteps, more often because the world preferred not to be reminded of the clear lessons of the Gospels. As my father used to say, “They’d rather think Jesus was just kidding.”

The Jesuits questioned assumptions. They challenged authority. And they took the great risk of teaching that audacity, knowing that upstart students like Galileo and Voltaire would turn it all back on them.

Jesuit education has never been satisfied with teaching doctrine. We are not agnostic about the ways our students use the powerful tools we give them. We educate the whole person, cura personalis, because the point of education is to transform the world. We do not just teach, we do not even create opportunity—we forge character, we change lives.

And so we have done here at Fordham for 181 years.

Fordham inspired the kind of courage in our students that resulted in six Congressional Medals of Honor and seven Presidential Medals of Freedom, a record probably unmatched outside of the military academies.

Fordham fostered the blazing talent of a Vince Lombardi playing in his leather helmet and that of the prolific writer Mary Higgins Clark.

Fordham taught Robert Gould Shaw, who died a hero leading a division of Black soldiers finally allowed to fight in the Civil War. And Fordham taught Denzel Washington, who won an Oscar making those troops famous in the movie Glory.

So many of you sitting here today have told me the stories of how Fordham made all the difference in the trajectory of your family, as it has in mine. So many of you—now scientists and artists and captains of industry—were the first in your family to go to college.

Just imagine how much more the students sitting here with us today can achieve.

I want to stop and say something particular to all of us who are the children of Dublin and Donegal, of Messina and Milano. We have climbed so far, but there is a dangerous temptation dangled in front of us—that we can gain acceptance in this country as long as we turn our backs on those still waiting for their chance. A Faustian bargain to pull up the ladder behind us.

But we can never turn our back—not on those still climbing over the brutally unfair obstacles of exclusion and racism thrown in their way. Not on the new waves of immigrants.

We must never forget what it is to be hungry for opportunity and determined beyond measure. We must forever fight the ways the game continues to be rigged.

Because we know what happens when you throw your doors open ever wider—when you take the lessons of the Gospels literally. Then and only then can you bring together the most talented, because they come in every creed and color, every race and religion.

And we work ever harder to make our students know that they belong here. To lighten the burdens the world has put on so many of their backs. To succeed at making them feel the overwhelming love and acceptance of God.

New York, this amazing city, proves the strength that comes from diversity. It brings together millions of people from every nation. And what should be utter chaos—desperate people fleeing poverty and oppression, living in ridiculously close proximity, speaking a Babel of languages—instead has forged the economic and cultural capital of the world. New York proves every day what chutzpah and gumption and resilience can achieve.

And Fordham has been a fundamental part of New York’s success. For almost two centuries, it has invested in talent that might have been wasted. Turned determination into achievement.

(Now, as the ultimate global city, New York brings the world to Fordham, but we can’t rest on our laurels. We need to send our students out, as Ignatius did, to learn from the world, at our London campus and far beyond. We have the enormous advantage of being part of a global church; we have educated the leadership of Catholic institutions around the world. We have so many possibilities to partner with them.)

Some of you sitting here with very practical minds may be wondering how we will do all of this. How will we bridge the gap between the excellence our students deserve at a cost they can afford? How will we continue to grow and succeed in a very crowded market? These aren’t small questions during a challenging time for higher education.

That leads me to the point I most want to make.

We will succeed because of our mission, not in spite of it.

As we recruit the best and brightest of this generation, we need to remember what they have been through. Born just before the Great Recession, they missed years of their adolescence for a global pandemic. They watch a warming planet worried that we have traded away their futures.

They have a right to be cynical, but they do not despair. They face their futures with urgent determination. When they choose a college, they can smell the difference between virtue signaling and real impact, real courage.

This generation wants to fix broken systems and repair the world. They want to question assumptions. They want to push on authority. Sound familiar?

If we remain true to ourselves, if we avoid chasing status for its own sake, if we double down on Jesuit mission, students will choose us because of who we are.

Let me give you a concrete example of what I mean. When students make their choice, they look to see whether a university cares about the future of the planet. They will notice that Fordham has reduced its carbon footprint by a third and built the largest solar field in New York City.

But there are so many other ways we can—and do—have impact on the world around us.

We sit at the epicenter of the global economy. We can help harness the power of capitalism to find the answers, with the speed and innovation required. As the Gabelli faculty have already begun to do, we can convene the most powerful and inspire real action on climate change.

We can use our strength in the humanities to find the best ways to persuade the world to come together, to listen to the logic of science, to notice the urgent signs of the times, and to hear the cry of the poor. To achieve that, we need the insights of psychology, the lessons of history, and the empathy created by literature and art.

And we have special credibility as a Jesuit, Catholic institution. Because (as the Civil Rights Movement showed us) sometimes it takes the call of faith to cut through political rationalizations and the fog of denial. So we lean into the teachings of Pope Francis and his predecessors. We magnify the clarion call of Laudato Si.

My dream for Fordham is that we use our resources—especially the brilliance and creativity of our people—to make even more of an impact, starting always in our own community here in the Bronx and expanding outward.

To invest ever more in our faculty as they solve complicated problems and grapple with the deepest meaning of human culture. To know that the work we do matters.

To imbue in our students a lifelong curiosity, because this is just the beginning of their education.

To teach our students to challenge injustice and to be proud of them when they start by challenging us.

To model our values to the students in the ways we run this institution.

To succeed because we listen to the ideas of our own people and unlock their very Jesuit creativity and innovation.

And when we succeed, in the classroom, the research lab, and every corner of the University, it will be because of you—your ideas, your wisdom, and your determination.

(Now let me admit something to the people who work at Fordham. In writing this speech, I realized I overused the word “determination.” Six times already and I’m not even quite done. I imagine that in the exhaustion of the pandemic, some of you may be listening to my aspirations and feeling, well, tired.)

We face a serious temptation right now, the temptation of unrelenting cynicism, the kind that always proves itself right. The certainty that things will turn out badly and so we shouldn’t bother to try.

Today I am asking you to hope. To have the courage to hope. Not because these are hopeful times; they are not. But because these are urgent times.

Because our students, whose futures are very much at stake, are watching us. They are deciding whether to risk hoping and believing that they might make a difference.

Let’s teach them how it’s done. Better yet, let’s show them how it’s done. Let’s prove to them that we care about their future.

We do not do this work because it is easy but because it is important. This University has endured and adapted through overwhelming challenges. Fires and floods and world wars. Not just this global pandemic but also the one in 1918. We honor the courage of those who came before us and we work tirelessly for the students standing in front of us.

I come to you as a daughter of New Orleans—steeped in resilience and creativity. I was raised in a deeply Catholic and African American city, capable of weaving mourning into joy. If you want to better understand what that means, stay for the concert tonight.

But I am also a daughter of New York, where I spent my first formative years learning how to walk and to talk. That might explain a lifelong impatience and frustration with the usual pace of reform. It might also explain a certain bluntness underneath my southern charm. (Just to translate for you in advance, if I tell you “bless your heart,” it’s not actually a compliment.)

I will try every day to find the wisdom, courage, and joy to do this job well. To be worthy of the University that is the reason my parents met and thus the reason I exist.

I am so grateful, for the achievements of the students who flock here and the remarkable alumni they become.

To the Board of Trustees, past and present, who devote so much of their time and treasure to the University they love. The donors, big and small, who pay forward the opportunity they received and invest in a university they love.

For all of those who have dedicated their careers to Fordham—teaching, mentoring, serving, and supporting our students and this institution. You are the heart and soul of this University.

All of the Jesuits, who pray for me every day. I’ve grown up thinking of all of you as uncles, who had a perfect right to correct me, long before I took this job. I’m still counting on that.

What gives me strength is the training I’ve gotten from my beloved Uncle Joe, from my irrepressible father and brilliant mother.

My mentors through all of my winding careers, including Marc Morial and Fr. Curran, Lindy Boggs, the Landrieus, and so many others. And the teachers, like David Wilkins, who changed my life.

My big extended family, and the friends who have acted like family.

My sisters, Sonia and Sarah—we’ve been in this together our whole lives, and I would not be the same person without your love and support, and now that of my sister-in-law, Connie.

My husband, Gordon Stewart, my biggest supporter, who always finds a way to make me laugh even on the hardest days.

My stepson, who came into my life as a toddler and taught me how to love with my whole heart.

And the smallest person here, with the biggest heart, is my daughter, Lucy. She already has many good ideas for campus life, including buying a ram costume for our golden retriever. She does a wonderful job of keeping me humble. Lucy, you are my light and my hope.

Fordham, the world has never needed us more.

If we are ambitious for the cause, if we are humble and creative, if we stay true to our mission, there is nothing we can’t do.

This is our moment. Thank you.

On Oct. 14, Tania Tetlow was formally inaugurated as Fordham’s 33rd president, making history as the first layperson and first woman to lead the University.

Now, she said, it is time for us all to make history.

“Today I am asking you to hope. To have the courage to hope. Not because these are hopeful times; they are not. But because these are urgent times,” she said.

“At a moment of darkening clouds in the world, we gather on this bright, shining day to remember that Fordham has such power to make the world a better place.”

Taking Inspiration from a Providential Past

The day began with a Mass at the University Church, in which Joseph M. O’Keefe, S.J., GSAS’ 81, provincial of the USA East Province of the Society of Jesus, confirmed Tetlow in her mission as director of the apostolic work of Fordham. The Mass brought together Jesuits from around the province, including Fordham President Emeritus Joseph M. McShane, S.J., who received several rounds of applause throughout the day.

The festivities drew some 2,000 guests to the Rose Hill campus. In addition to Tetlow’s family and friends, Fordham alumni, faculty, students, administrators, and delegates from nearly 60 universities around the world were present. The formal ceremony on Keating Terrace was followed by a “Prez Fest” celebration on Edwards Parade and a concert featuring the Preservation Hall Jazz Band from New Orleans. The event concluded a weeklong celebration that kicked off with a lecture on Tuesday about Fordham’s place in the world.

In a spirited call to harness the resources of the University to change the world, Tetlow tied her vision of the University’s future directly to the past, citing Archbishop John Hughes’ founding of Fordham 181 years ago.

“In 1841, Archbishop John Hughes struggled to serve the hundreds of thousands of immigrants streaming into New York, so desperate and so determined. He organized food and shelter for them, but he also recognized their deeper hunger for education and opportunity,” she said.

“Hughes founded a college on this spot and called it St. John’s. He did so as an act of hope, because he could see the talent and potential in those desperate people coming off the ships.”

That she should end up leading that college—now a global university—is almost kismet, she said, noting how her father and mother met at the Rose Hill campus as graduate students. Her father, who had been a Jesuit priest for 17 years, made the “agonizing decision” to leave the Society of Jesus to marry her mother and raise Tetlow and her two sisters. Her Uncle Joe, who is 92 years old and watched the ceremony via livestream, is a Jesuit priest and prolific author. Tetlow said she grew up thinking of all Jesuits as uncles.

“I like to think [my father]  made the right choice, but regardless, I hope I’ve made it up to the Jesuits,” she said to laughter.

Today, she said, there is a greater need than ever to take a stand for both faith and reason, as Jesuits always have. Education doesn’t dilute faith, she said, it fuels it.

“Within Catholic tradition, there are many models of service, including goodness rooted in purity, in monastic seclusion from the wicked world. The Jesuits chose the riskier path—to engage, to push to make the world better,” she said.

“It often got them in a great deal of trouble. Sometimes it was because of missteps, but more often it was because the world preferred not to be reminded of the clear lessons of the gospels. As my father used to say, ‘They’d rather think Jesus was just kidding.’”

“My dream for Fordham is that we use our resources—especially the brilliance and creativity of our people—to make even more of an impact, starting always in our own community here in the Bronx and expanding outward.”

From NOLA to NYC, Testimonies Abound

The program featured speeches from a wide array of dignitaries. Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, delivered the invocation, and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer extended his thanks to Father McShane and well-wishes to Tetlow.

Marc Morial, the president and CEO of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans, shared recollections of his relationship with Tetlow, which she began when she walked into his campaign headquarters as an 18-year-old college student. He called her a “true steel magnolia.”

“She has this incredible humility, this charm, but this underbelly of strength and determination,” he said.

“She will smile, she will listen to you, she will nod her head. But make no mistake about it; she is processing every single word.”

Thomas B. Curran, S.J., president emeritus of Rockhurst University, related his experience of working with her as a board member of Loyola University, where she was president before coming to Fordham.

“Very soon, if it’s not already the case, you will discover what I have come to know of Tania Tetlow. It’s a privilege to know her, it’s a gift to work with her, and it’s a rich blessing to learn from her,” he said.

“With Tania, we are called to be collaborators. This will move us towards the end for which we have been created and help bring forth the greater glory of God.”

Robert Daleo, GABELLI ’72, chair of the Fordham University Board of Trustees, praised Tetlow as “eminently qualified—by temperament, experience, and ability—to lead Fordham at this inflection point in higher education, and in the political and cultural life of our nation.”

John Drummond, Ph.D., Fordham’s Southwell Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities, offered his greetings on behalf of the University faculty, while Linda LoSchiavo, TMC ’72, director of the University Libraries, welcomed Tetlow on behalf of administrators and staff.

Students were represented by Djellza Pulatani, president of the United Student Government at Lincoln Center, and Santiago Vidal, executive president of the United Student Government at Rose Hill.

Pulatani said she’s excited to see how Tetlow will “lead us through a new era of robust unity wherein the voice of every Fordham student is heard, listened to, and appreciated.”

“We are inspired by the trailblazer that President Tetlow is, showing the world that women always belong in the place of decision-making,” she said.

“Her presidency will undeniably become a turning point for the women of Fordham University and the successful futures they will have.”

Well-Wishes from Near and Far

David Wilkins knew there was something special about Tetlow from almost the moment he met her when she was a student at Harvard Law School.

“I had Tania as a student in her very first day of law school, and it did not take very long before it was very clear that she was really an extraordinary person,” said Wilkins, who is the Lester Kissel Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “She was a brilliant student—at Harvard, we have lots of brilliant students—but she was clearly an extraordinary person.”

Wilkins said that what makes Tetlow so special is how she incorporates her values and principles into everything she does.

“She had a wonderful kind of mind that loves to think about problems and puzzle through them but always with a generosity of spirit,” he said. “When she approached the law and legal issues, it was never just, ‘How do I make my side win?’ or ‘How do I make the most complicated argument that makes me look really smart?’ It was always about, ‘How can we use the law as a tool to solve problems?’”

Wilkins said that Tetlow is someone who was “born to help bridge these divides” that the country is facing at this moment in history.

“I think those are the greatest qualities you can have as a university president—to be an empathetic listener and to be a creative problem solver,” he said.

Fordham students Alessandra Carino and Sean Power said that they were excited to be a part of the inauguration festivities since it was such a historic day for the university.

“I’m very excited about President Tetlow,” said Carino, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill and the president of the Commuting Students Association. “I think just her perspective as a woman, as a layperson, is really important. I think her lived experience is going to bring a different [way of]  problem solving or just a different perspective than the University has seen.”

Power said that he was hopeful she would help maintain Jesuit values at Fordham as she ushers in a new phase.

“President Tetlow, she’s got as much Jesuit background as you can without being a Jesuit, so I’m really excited Fordham’s going to maintain that even with a layperson as president,” he said.

Adrienne de la Fuente, FCLC ’10, said she returned to campus with her husband, David de la Fuente, FCLC ’10, who is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, to see the historic inauguration.

“It’s really great to see the transition from Father McShane’s legacy to President Tetlow,” she said.

De la Fuente said she saw firsthand the impact Father McShane had in making Fordham more of a national name, but she said she’s excited to see where the University can go next, particularly internationally. She works with students applying to schools in the United States, and “this is kind of the first wave of Fordham being something that I hear students ask us about, so I want to see that momentum continue.”

For Jennifer Avegno and her family, the purpose of the trip to Fordham was twofold—her daughters decided to take a tour of the University as prospective students, and she had the chance to see her friend be inaugurated as Fordham’s new president.

“She’s such a wonderful, well-rounded leader—compassionate, smart, thoughtful, spiritual. She’s really the whole package,” Avegno said. “Loyola was so lucky to have her. Fordham is really lucky.”

Avegno said she saw firsthand what Tetlow brought to Loyola New Orleans and she is excited to see what she will do at Fordham, in the heart of New York.

“Is New York ready for her, I think, is the question,” Avegno said with a smile.

—Additional reporting by Kelly Prinz

—Photos by Bruce Gilbert and Chris Taggart

—Video by Taylor Ha and Tom Stoelker

The evening showcase, The Movement, Melodrama, and Melodies of NYC, featured dance solos from the Ailey/Fordham students and performances of the Grammy- and Academy Award-winning song The Shadow of Your Smile, as well as popular rhythm and blues song Route 66 by the Fordham Jazz Ensemble. Members of Fordham Theatre also performed an excerpt from the play Indecent, which celebrates the love, magic, and hope of the theater. Following the showcase held in Costantino Room, guests wined and dined at a reception held in the adjacent Soden Lounge and Bateman Room. 

In her closing remarks at the end of the showcase, Tetlow thanked the students for their “stunning” performance and their ability to evoke emotion. 

“There’s a world where we would have our business school students discuss a business plan, and watch the law student try to brief, and have a calculus problem on a whiteboard, just to demonstrate their talent and discipline and hard work, but none of them would have made us feel what you made us feel tonight,” Tetlow said. 

She also praised the students for their courage to perform on stage and admired the dancers’ agility. (Watching the Ailey dancers almost made her pull a muscle, she joked.) In addition, she highlighted the students’ nod to American history. 

“I think that you, tonight, really earned our spot on San Juan Hill. I feel the spirits of the people who lived here who were so important in American history and in American cultural history, from Zora Neale Hurston to Thelonious Monk. And you have made it such that we deserve this spot of their making and deserve our spot as part of Lincoln Center of the Performing Arts because we are part of this grand experiment to bring together such amazing culture of this country and in the world,” said Tetlow. “So thank you for demonstrating what Fordham is and your own talent and for making the kickoff to this inauguration so special.” 

Anne Williams-Isom, FCLC ’86, the deputy mayor for health and human services in New York City and the James R. Dumpson Chair in Child Welfare Studies at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, served as the moderator of the panel, which featured Celia Fisher, Ph.D., the Marie Ward Doty University Chair in Ethics and founding director of Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education; Rev. Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham; and Professor Iftekhar Hasan, the E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in International Business and Finance at the Gabelli School of Business.

The panel, held on Oct. 11 at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, was a part of a weeklong series of events celebrating the inauguration of President Tania Tetlow as the 33rd president of Fordham. Tetlow, who gave the closing remarks at the event, said that discussions like this were part of why she decided to come to Fordham.

“Fordham has this incredible chance to matter; the reason I came here is because as the world feels like it’s coming apart at the seams, I wanted to be at the place that could make the most difference—not because we’re going to solve every world problem,” she said. “But because we are going to try.”

‘Hope Is Not Fantasy’

One of the biggest ways Fordham can address today’s challenges and inspire students to work on those challenges is by not ignoring “the bad stuff,” Massingale said.

“I think that we can move too easily to hope without looking at the bad stuff,” he said, highlighting that while issues such as ecological irresponsibility, attacks on voting rights, racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Asian hate have been around for a while, they’ve come racing back to the forefront in recent years.

“We’ve got to talk about the bad stuff, otherwise hope becomes escapism and fantasy, and hope is not fantasy,” he said. “I’m looking at all of these things—I think we have to be honest and ask ourselves, ‘How are we creating a student who’s able to take their place as a global citizen in the face of those challenges?’”

Hasan said that for students to become engaged with the global society, they have to learn how to weed out “the noise” that gets thrown at them on social media from important, factual information.

“The world has changed in such a way that the information that comes to the students—it used to be traditional newspapers, TV, and radio—and now it comes from the big technology, social media,” he said. “In a social sense, they need to prepare to sort between the noise and what is fact.”

Teaching Soft and Hard Skills

Williams-Isom said that she recalled a time when she was working as the executive officer of the anti-poverty organization Harlem Children’s Zone, and felt that the hard skills she brought to the job weren’t enough to address the challenges of poverty her organization was trying to solve.

“I have all these [skills]—I have a law degree—and I was like ‘I need something else,’” she said, adding that she decided to get a doctorate in ministry to help with the spirit and “soul part” of her job. “I felt like I had these hard skills, but if I didn’t have the ability to see some hope in a healing, radical love kind of way, I wasn’t really going to be prepared to do this work.”

Massingale said that Fordham has an opportunity to provide students with those “softer skills,” like critical reasoning and a desire to help those in need, that can help them face difficult situations.

“I think all too often we kind of apologize for a liberal education, saying that it’s not practical,” he said. “And what you just said is ‘yes, we can give skills, but skills are going to become outdated.’ What we need is something more—what’s going to keep you in this fight, especially when you don’t see how your skills are making any practical difference.”

Fisher said that one of the things that she tries to teach her students is “cultural and ethical humility.”

“How are we giving students that kind of tool?” said Fisher, whose Center for Ethics Education oversees Fordham’s master’s program in ethics and society. “As part of the Jesuit tradition, it’s an openness to others, as well as a desire and a need and understanding of self-reflection of our own biases, but also understanding that we cannot help people if we do not understand the social, political life that they’re living in.”

Fisher gave an example of students doing research and how they “can’t just be studying the individual, they have to be looking at the context in which the individual is engaged.”

Continued Growth and Improvement

Massingale said that the Jesuit values and ways of teaching, such as those that Fisher used to describe her students’ research, could be even more emphasized at Fordham.

“I think where we could do better is to think of something like the Jesuit universal apostolic preferences, where it talks about walking with the excluded, where it talks about walking with youth to give them a hope-filled future,” he said.

The panelists also called on the University to make sure it was continuously working to improve and address when “the fractured world” and its problems appear on campus, which was something that Tetlow reflected on in her closing remarks.

“I love the challenge to us, as an institution, to model our values and how we make those difficult choices…of how we collectively decide what kind of community we create and all the ways that we often fail in that regard, but forever strive to do better,” she said.

Learning From the Students

One way the University can make sure it does that is by listening to and learning from its students, Tetlow said.

“How we are willing to teach our students to question assumptions and challenge authority, knowing that they will turn that on us, and to be proud of them when they do it—even if it takes a minute,” she said.

Fisher said that this is something she’s taken to heart in her years of teaching.

“It’s very important that … we as professors indicate that we are open to learn, that we recognize that our life experience is not your life experience. What can you tell me? How can I help you? How can I connect you to others, whether it’s inside the University or outside, who can give you more than I can from that world perspective that we need,” Fisher said.

That message was echoed throughout, as the panel started with a video of eight students sharing their experiences about why they decided to go to Fordham.

“I came to Fordham Law to represent low-wage immigrant workers, particularly undocumented workers who have their wages stolen by bad employers,” Anthony Damelio, FCRH ’08, LAW ’22 said in the video. “Fordham Law gave me not only the tools necessary to become an excellent advocate for my clients, but it also stoked the flames of justice within me that are essential to lawyering for social change.

Williams-Isom emphasized the importance of centering the student voice.

“In some ways, we probably should always start with the student voice, because it keeps us grounded, and there certainly was a lot of hope there,” she said.