Who he is: Facilities Management, Grounds Services, Rose Hill Campus

How long at Fordham: Six years

Manny Linares-Galarza’s favorite tree is the  Ginkgo biloba tree. It’s not necessarily what one would expect from someone with a pretty thorough appreciation of trees, but like Linares-Galarza, the ginkgo has fortitude. He said he admires the tree because it has been around since prehistoric times.

Linares-Galarza’s life journey, from growing up in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn to landing his current role as a groundskeeper at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, has been filled with challenges. Raised in a foster home, Linares-Galarza said he largely found his “own way” through grade school, eventually landing a coveted spot at Brooklyn Technical High School. When college didn’t pan out as planned, he tried his hand at a training program run by the MillionTreesNYC initiative.

There, he took advantage of classes offered at the New York Botanical Garden and earned an arborist’s certificate, even though it required him to climb a lot of trees.

“I’m terrified of heights, and all you have is a rope and a saddle and you’re way up there.” he said. “Each time I was in the tree I was scared for my life, but I was 21 and I jumped on that opportunity.”

The certificate helped secure his position as a groundskeeper on campus, he said. Now, six years later, he is earning a bachelor’s degree in organizational leadership at the School of Professional and Continuing Studies and he is training to join the carpentry staff. He said that adapting isn’t always easy, but it’s for the best.

“If you put yourself outside of your comfort zone, you’ll be amazed at the things you can learn,” he said. “Even the ginkgo trees have had to adapt.”

He noted that the trees once had needles like pine trees, but as the trees evolved they developed leaves.

“If you look at the ginkgo leaves they’re striated, like a bunch of needles formed together,” he said. “It’s survival of the fittest, and the tree realized that having a broad leaf would bring in more sunlight.”

“Taking courses like these opens your mind to ideas you never would have considered,” he said. “Too often we close ourselves in these tight circles. We have the biases we grow up with, and we have to be mindful of the fact that in other households they’re being taught other religions in the same way.”

He said he hopes to graduate next year and set an example for his daughter Emma, who will be 2 years old in April. His wife has a master’s and is a New York City schools teacher.

“I want to instill in our daughter a desire to push forward,” he said Linares-Galarza, who  knows all too well what it’s like not to have parents to show the way.

“Whatever makes me a better person, a better provider, and a better dad, I’ll take that opportunity.”

Kramer, a prizewinning composer and Distinguished Professor of English and Music, argues in his new book The Thought of Music (University of California Press, 2016) that music is not just an expressive outlet, but a legitimate mode of thinking about the world.

The book is the final installment in a series of three, which includes Interpreting Music (2010) and Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (2012).

“The volumes together seek to answer three fundamental questions,” Kramer said. “First, what does understanding music consist of? Second, what does understanding music tell us about the character of humanistic understanding in general? And finally, what kind of knowledge does such understanding produce?”

The Thought of Music examines how we think about music and how we think by means of music, questions that Kramer said harken back to Beethoven’s definition of music as “thinking in tones.” Beyond being a means of expression, music can function as a way of thinking about critical human issues such as memory, language, pleasure, rationality, and sexuality, which are just some of the topics addressed in the book.

Elucidating the role that music plays in human thought is particularly important for the field of musicology, the academic study of music. Through the trilogy, Kramer’s goal is to bring music—particularly classical music—into broader conversations within the humanities about ideas such as meaning, identity, society, and culture.

“In the book, the notorious fact that it is difficult to specify what music means becomes a positive force rather than a disability,” Kramer said. “Music [is an example]of the difficulties posed by humanistic knowledge—a form of knowledge that, beyond raw data collection, always involves cognitive uncertainty.”

Guns in America

The shooting in San Bernardino will not change the larger dynamic at work in the contentious debate over the role of guns in American society. The gun rights position and the gun violence reduction policy agenda are each a product of a complex amalgam of  interests and ideologies.  Each must work in the increasingly dysfunctional world of American politics,  a reality in which the wealthier, more entrenched interest tends to win: in this case guns. We are unlikely to see major changes at the national level and will continue to see the nation drift in opposite directions at the state level—“Red America” will likely continue to expand the right to carry in public and “Blue America” will pass some more regulations consistent with the way the courts have construed the meaning of the right to bear arms in recent years.

– Saul Cornell, PhD, Paul and Diane Gunther Chair in History and author, A Well-Regulated Militia: the Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America.

Fantasy Sports Shutdown

After a period of spectacular growth in an unregulated market, both FanDuel and DraftKings will have a rocky 2016. The New York State Office of the Attorney General will likely prevail in its quest to shut down these sites in New York (which had the largest number of players of any state), but only after months of litigation and appeals. However, it is likely these daily fantasy sports sites will continue to operate in other states, although in a more regulated fashion. The ultimate solution would be to legalize sports betting in some fashion, which would eliminate the need to debate whether daily fantasy sports constitutes gambling or not. I don’t see that happening next year, but [perhaps]in the next five years.

– Mark Conrad, Area Chair and Associate Professor of Law and Ethics, Gabelli School of Business and director of its sports business concentration

Prison Reform

This coming year, New York State and the federal government will be challenged with following suit on their commitment to prison reform and improving community reintegration for incarcerated people of all ages. Ending solitary confinement, a form of inhumane punishment, will continue to gain state and national support. The shift from punishment to rehabilitation will open the door for trauma-informed care, [and]concerted efforts of local and national advocacy groups will increase public awareness of the consequences of mass incarceration, resulting in an increase of public support for humanistic prison reform and more community reintegration. In our own backyard, Fordham’s Be the Evidence project is collaborating with the New York State Department of Corrections to establish a statewide initiative for a discharge planning unit for the most vulnerable of prison populations—the aging and seriously ill. Perhaps most importantly, Sesame Street will continue to enlighten people about the experiences of young children who have an incarcerated parent. It may be the puppets (as opposed to the politicians) that will release us from the invisible prisons that separate each of us from one another’s common humanity.

– Tina Maschi, PhD, associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service and president of Be the Evidence International

Escalating Humanitarian Crises

In 2005, Madame Sadako Ogata, then the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said of the Balkan crisis, “There are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems,” stating that only political action can bring about real change. That statement is still true 10 years later. In 2016, due to political inaction, the current Middle East migration crises will worsen, and increased human displacement and suffering will continue. Perhaps, even worse, the humanitarian community will continue to lack critical and needed financial support and qualified personnel. Other countries in the region, especially Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon, will therefore see an increase in unrest, adding to the overall migration numbers.

– Brendan Cahill, executive director of Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs

Reproductive Ethics

Uterus transplant clinical trials are currently—and will continue to be—a major news story in 2016. At this stage, a study in Sweden involving nine women who received uteruses from living donors resulted in five pregnancies and four live births in 2015. Two other clinical trials are set to begin next year: one in the United Kingdom, and one at the Cleveland Clinic in the United States.  A significant ethical issue with the Swedish trial was the fact that the living donors had to undergo major surgery with potential complications for something that had no direct physical benefit for them. But the new trials will differ from the one that took place in Sweden, because each uterus will come from a deceased donor, eliminating potential harm to a living donor. However, many questions remain unanswered, including whether uteruses transplanted from deceased donors will result in pregnancies, and whether women will view posthumous [womb]donation differently than donating other organs currently used in transplants, such as kidneys and hearts, because of its unique role as the organ responsible for gestation.

– Elizabeth Yuko, PhD, bioethicist at Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education

Rate Increase Ripple Effects

When the Fed set its monetary policy in December 2015, they were making policy [strictly]on the basis of the U.S. economy, but at the same time it affects the entire world. The new interest rate hike clearly appreciates the dollar, and the real question for the emerging market countries is, if something looks risky to an investor in another country, why keep your money there when you can get guaranteed dollar-denominated deposits? Even at .25 percent, when multiplied by hundreds of billions of dollars, that is real money. So investment is flowing back to the United States. Given that people will be less willing to invest in emerging markets—China, Brazil, Argentina, and the Middle East—their currencies will depreciate. If there are slowdowns in some of these nations, their domestic debt crises could compound quickly.

– Paul McNelis, SJ, Robert Bendheim Professor of Economic & Financial Policy, Finance and Business Economics, Gabelli School of Business

Climate Change and the Marginalized

The coming year looks hopeful for the environment. The agreement reached at COP21 finally replaces the question of climate change with a dialogue about combatting it. While international agreements do not solve local problems, they can create a more supportive climate for local communities trying to address them. In Paris, I saw attention shifting to the role of indigenous peoples and a renewed appreciation for the traditional knowledge of local communities. These inevitably slow-but-vital shifts in global perspective bring to light the marginalized person whom development efforts should ultimately target. These people offer us ideas on how to achieve economic growth without harming the environment. Scaling their daily work to reach the goals set by world leaders is key to sustainable development.

– Elizabeth Shaw, graduate student in Fordham’s International Political Economy and Development program, and attendee at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21)

2016 Presidential Election

Elections are ultimately determined, in part, by which voters show up. The 2016 election’s likely turnout of 60 percent, while lower than many would like, will exceed the turnout in 2014 by about 20 percentage points. Higher turnout generally favors Democrats, because many voters who abstain in midterms and other low-salience elections are young or new voters and minorities. Still, many things are up in the air: For example, if Donald Trump fails to get the GOP nomination, do his supporters sit out the election or does he mount a third-party candidacy that appeals to them? Turnout—along with outcomes generally—is also driven by fundamentals like perceptions of economic performance and the incumbent party. Seeking your party’s third term in the White House seems to carry a general-election penalty of 4 or 5 percentage points, so the Democratic nominee will have to work hard to mitigate that effect.

— Costas Panagopoulos, PhD, professor of political science and director of Fordham’s Elections and Campaign Management program

ISIS

ISIS has defined itself as “ISIS against the world.” That offers the US and other nations a unifying focal point. I think the strategy we have now will continue to grow, which is to engage with more Muslim heads of state and  leaders from various countries to mount a united front. It’ll be interesting to see how Iran fits into that conversation and what happens with the U.S./Saudi alliance, but I don’t think it will change U.S./Russian relations very much. Domestically, ISIS has provided a unifying focal point as well. It’s been very reassuring to see strong pushback against Trump’s anti-Muslim comments. Individuals from across the political spectrum have declared that his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country violates the most fundamental constitutional guarantees.

– Karen Greenberg, PhD, is the director of the Center on National Security

The annual 1841 Awards ceremony recognized those support staff members who have been at Fordham for 20 or 40 years. Those in attendance were lauded by their supervisors and presented with medals by Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham.

With a collective 260 years of services, this years awardees are:

40 years:

• Lorene Pasciotty, Fordham College at Rose Hill

20 years

• Jason Cruz, Grounds and Transportation
• Matthew Delgado, Fordham Libraries
• Roman Makowicz, Physical Plant
• Jose Monegro, Custodial Services
• Gillian Navarro, Enrollment Services
• Victoria Raphael, Custodial Services
• Joe Rosado, Custodial Services
• William T. Slade, Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education
• Kathleen Ungar, Fordham Libraries
• John Yonko, Facilities Operations

The 1841 Award was established in 1982 by former president James C. Finlay, SJ, in honor of the year Fordham was founded by Archbishop John Hughes.

The event was followed by a reception that welcomed family members and co-workers.

Last year Columbia made a quiet reorganization of their playing schedule. Although they had been starting each season since 2001 with the Liberty Cup game against Fordham, a decision was made to focus on games with peer colleges in the Ivy League going forward. (Fordham is in the Patriot League.)

As such, this may possibly be the last Liberty Cup, too, as well as the last New York City team on Fordham’s football schedule.

The history between the Rams and other New York teams makes for an interesting story in a town that isn’t particularly known for college football.

The Rams first played Columbia in in 1890, and then again in 1902. They didn’t play again until 1972, and then they played from ’91 through ’94, in ’96, and in 2000.

In 2001, the world changed.

Fordham and Columbia were scheduled to play the weekend after 9/11. The game was canceled, but the teams agreed to reschedule and play that Thanksgiving Day. Like so many efforts around the city, the game was an attempt to move forward and to move on, and the teams agreed to play an annual Liberty Cup starting in 2002.

Crosstown Rivalries

As crosstown rivalries go, however, Fordham vs. Columbia isn’t exactly the Yankees vs. Mets. Old-time Rams swore by another rival team that was also Catholic and in the Bronx.

“The single biggest rivalry was Manhattan College, that was always the biggest game of the year,” recalled Fordham Trustee John Zizzo, FCRH ’69. “In 1967 we got Jerseys made that said ‘Beat Manhattan’ and the Manhattan team was livid. So in ’68 they wanted to get back at us and they put decal of Ram on their helmets and crossed it out with an ‘X,’ but we still slaughtered them.”

But Manhattan College lost their team in 1987.

Another city rival was NYU, but it was a friendly rival. In fact, if it weren’t for NYU, Fordham might not have the team it has today. After the Rams disbanded for several years, the Class of 1964 attempted to bring the storied team back into existence as a club team. It was NYU Coach Vic Obeck that agreed to play the scrappy team.

“We wanted desperately to play Columbia, but they would’ve been embarrassed to get beaten by a club team,” said Zizzo, who noted that, two years after turning varsity in 1970, Fordham and Columbia were back as rivals once again.

Memorializing 9/11

In 2002, Fordham and Columbia memorialized members of their communities who were lost on 9/11 with the Liberty Cup, and a 13-year legacy began. The Liberty Cup features a scholarship for students who lost a parent in the 9/11 attacks. Each year the host team has selects a scholarship winner, regardless of who wins the game. The record thus far has been Fordham 9 and Columbia 4.

“We would certainly like to play them later on in the year if that ever works for them,” said David Roach, director of Fordham Athletics. “With the Liberty Cup proceeds going to the 9/11 scholarship fund, I think it’s a great event.”

Soon there will be very few college-age children of parents who died on 9/11. Today’s freshman class was 4 years old when the event occurred. So in many ways the purpose of the Liberty Cup games has been served, having helped the city to move forward and help those left behind.

Still Roach still holds out hope for a New York City rival revival.

“We’ve had some pretty great success against them the last couple of years,” he said. “But everything goes in cycles. We hope to get it back and have it be a good rivalry.”

Join us on Sept. 19 when the Rams play the Lions.

Most would agree that being a parent is the hardest job on the planet. But for one woman, that job gets carried out onto the tennis court as well. For Bette-Ann Liguori, being a parent and a coach has intertwined ever since her daughter Dominique pursued her lifelong sport of tennis.  In 2003, Bette-Ann was inducted into the Fordham Athletic Hall of Fame, and she just completed her sixth season as the Women’s Tennis head coach. For the first time in Fordham history, Dominique Damian has accompanied her mother in being a member of the Fordham Athletic Hall of Fame. This is the only parent-child pairing to be inducted into the Hall of Fame.

It’s no question that Bette-Ann’s tremendous success and passion for the game was passed down to her daughter – making it more of a family tradition. Dominique has proven herself to be one of the most prolific women’s tennis players at Fordham. She finished her senior year with a perfect 19-0 season record, an outstanding 57-4 career record, and joined her mother in winning the prestigious Hobbs Family Award given to Fordham’s Female Athlete of the Year.

Growing up with your mother as your head coach and constant support system, on and off the court, was not the simplest situation to be in for Dominique. But, as she matured as a top player throughout high school, she knew she wanted to uphold her mother’s legacy and create one of her own. “It was hard having a parent who knew the ins and outs of the sport you’re playing because it was difficult to separate her being my mom and my coach at the same time,” Dominique admitted. However, once she matured and began to understand the game better, she says it got easier once her mom gave her space to grow on her own. Once she was able to do this, Dominique began to take her mother’s advice over others because “in the end, she was the little voice in my head” at all times.

Their mother-daughter relationship expanded to an entirely new level as Dominique ended up leading her mother’s team at The Ursuline School (New Rochelle, NY) to a record-breaking 100-match winning streak. Dominique went on to follow in her mother’s footsteps and continue her tennis career as a fellow Fordham Ram. Through her innate sense of competitiveness, exceptional talent, and her mother’s support and advice constantly running through her head, Dominique has certainly created a legacy of her own at Fordham and beyond. Her and her mother’s athletic achievements at Fordham are unmatched, and they deserve an incredible amount of respects for being Fordham’s first mother-daughter, and parent-child, duo in the Athletic Hall of Fame. With hereditary athletic talent and intelligence like theirs, it will be no surprise to see future generations joining them as well.

Today, Dominique’s love for tennis remains just as prominent in her life, as she, like her mother, has made the transition from player to coach. She has said that she finds herself telling her kids the same advice that her mother had always told her, and even though sometimes she did not want it to, those words have been rooted deep into her brain. Bette-Ann’s lessons about life on and off the court are forever embedded in Dominique’s mind as she hopes she can continue to follow in her mother’s footsteps. With all of the deserved appreciation she has received after being inducted, Dominique feels, “I am lucky that my mom knew how to be a teacher after being a player all of her life, and I’m so proud this has all happened the way that it has.”

Who she is
Since 2006 she has  been the executive director of the Corporate Law Center at the Fordham School of Law.

What she does
Rakoff oversees the operations of the center, which began in 2001 as a think tank for research in business and financial law. The center hosts public lectures, roundtable discussions, expert panels, and academic symposia. This past year, the center organized more than 35 programs.

“I try to think about what’s happening now that, in six months from now, will still be a hot topic for a speaker or panel or roundtable program. Ideally they’ll be ideas that might mesh with the academic research going on within the business law faculty, because we want to support their scholarly research and writing.”

Favorite Part of the Job
“I love working with the students. With how much it costs to attend law school and the vicissitudes of the market, I really enjoy working with students who want to make a difference in corporate and business law. I also love helping the center grow and its ability to influence the corporate and financial worlds. This is a very exciting time, as we’re involved with many projects—in particular, our role in the development of the Compliance Initiatives at the Law School.”

Life Before Fordham
Rakoff grew up in the Hyde Park section of Chicago, and attended college in Boston before earning a doctorate in child development and special education at Columbia University. She spent 20 years raising a family in Larchmont, New York, and doing volunteer work in the community before returning to the workforce full-time. She served as president of the local school’s parents association, was an assistant soccer coach, a Girl Scout leader, chair of publicity for the local League of Women Voters, and active at her temple. She earned a graduate certificate in nonprofit leadership at Manhattanville College shortly before coming to Fordham Law.

Returning to the Workforce after Raising a Family
“Because my daughters were in college and I was finishing graduate school, I was very ready to hang my hat somewhere in the workplace. While I loved being a stay-at-home parent, I’d felt very fortunate to be able to get out and give back to the community and the schools.
“Going back to work took a little bit of learning about commuting, but to me, there’s nothing more exciting than being part of an academic institution. I love the life, the pace, the ideas, and the people.”

Hobbies and Family
Ann and her husband Jed Rakoff, a U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of New York, have been married for 40 years. They have three daughters—Jena, Elana, and Keira, and one grandson, Jonah. In 2009, in anticipation of Jena’s wedding, Rakoff informed her husband that she wanted to take ballroom dancing lessons.

“I said ‘I’m just going to take a few dance lessons because I don’t want to embarrass myself on the dance floor. You can come with me or not, as the spirit moves you.’ Sort of grumbling, he went, and we’ve been going two to three times a week ever since,” she said.

“Right now we’re working on the Argentine tango. I’m very happy when I can remember the steps, because it can be a little complicated. In Argentine tango in particular, the woman does most of the footwork. But the man is her support. We enjoy it; spending time together learning something new and meeting new people, it’s a lot of fun.”

—Patrick Verel

Ask Mathilde Freund her age and she offers a demure response, “It should be a secret!” The 96-year-old Freund has reason to be proud of her age, but modesty forbids. She has met some of life’s toughest challenges and has witnessed history’s darkest moments. She is a holocaust survivor who arrived in New York with mother, daughter, and a wedding ring hidden in the hem of her skirt. Her newlywed husband died at Buchenwald. Her brother was shot on orders from Klaus Barbie.

Freund takes a highly philosophical perspective of these events, much of it culled through literature read as a student in Fordham’s School for Professional and Continuing Studies’ College at 60 program. The program turns 40 this year and Freund has been taking class there for 35 years.

Stay up-to-date on campus happenings.  Sign up for our e-weekly Fordham News.

John Bugg, Ph.D., assistant professor and director of placement and professional development in the department of English, is the recipient of a NEH Faculty Fellowship for research on “Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism.”

During the tenure of the fellowship, Bugg said he plans to “complete the research and writing of his study of the relationship between British literary culture and political repression in the decade after the French Revolution.”

Edward Cahill, Ph.D., assistant professor of English and acting director of the American Studies program, was awarded a NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Cahill will work on his project, “Colonial Rising: Narratives of Upward Mobility in British America,” which argues that “cultures of social and economic self-transformation in 17th- and 18th-century anglophone colonial America were defined not by coherent visions of an ‘American Dream’ but rather by diverse expressions of aspiration, ambivalence, and hostility.

“By exploring stories and discourses of wealth acquisition and class mobility in colonial New England, the mid-Atlantic, the South, and the West Indies, I seek to shed historical light on the early representational forms of ambition, adventure, risk, movement, and change—values that, in the 21st century more than ever, shape and reflect our culture’s ideological assumptions and social practices,” Cahill said.

To read about what other Fordham faculty members have been up to, check out the “People” section of Inside Fordham on the Fordham website. This section, which contains faculty awards, honors and more, is updated in every new issue of Inside Fordham.

In The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and The Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge, 2010), the assistant

professor of history deconstructs the Soviet Union’s obsession with the fantasy of space exploration and the technology that catapulted the Communist country into the space race of the 20th century.

“Why is it that the Russians sent Sputnik into space in 1957, when the government wasn’t terribly interested?” Siddiqi asked.

The answer, he said, starts in the early 20th century with Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, an eccentric Russian schoolteacher who lived reclusively in a small village. A fan of Jules Verne and other science fiction writers, Tsiolkovsky was also a mathematician. In 1903, he developed an equation in theoretical astronautics for a viable rocket.

“Tsiolkovsky had a particular passion for space travel—how to get there, what to do when we arrived, and why we should go,” said Siddiqi, a specialist in Russian history. “He was a bit of an eccentric who believed that people went into space once they died, but he was an inspirational character for a generation of space enthusiasts in the 1920s.”

In the 1920s, there was a huge global interest in space and the cosmos, indicated by the rise in mass-market science fiction literature and popular cinema. In early Communist Russia, amateur clubs and organizations—inspired by Tsiolkovsky’s writings and dreams of space travel—began building homemade rockets.

“In Russia, there was an emergence in the late-19th century of a mystical notion of the cosmos that was often occultish,” Siddiqi said. “But by the 20th century, an explosion of sci-fi helped redirect that mystical interest into scientific and technical directions.”

Through archival research, Siddiqi found that many of those amateur clubs approached the government for funding to build. Turned down initially, they returned with a different strategy: If the government would fund their rocket construction, the rockets could be used to launch military weapons.

As rocket enthusiasts grew more sophisticated, so did the types of weapons being invented. With the escalation of the Cold War, the Soviet government became more interested in how to launch missiles against targets across the globe.

“By the 1950s, these young rocket enthusiasts were managers of the Soviet missile mission, hired to develop a way to deliver an atomic bomb on the United States,” Siddiqi said.

One such scientist was Sergei Korolyov. In the 1930s, Korolyov had been part of a state-sponsored center for rocket development. But when Stalin came to power, Korolyov was fingered as a dissenter and sent to a gulag in Siberia, and then to an internment camp for scientists.

Korolyov worked his way back into favor inside the Cold War bureaucracy in the late 1940s and, by the 1950s, became head of the nation’s intercontinental missile program under Nikita Khrushchev.

It was the height of the Cold War and the Soviet government was not at all preoccupied with going into space.

“But Korolyov had not abandoned that dream,” Siddiqi said.

Aware of the deep rivalry between the Soviets and the United States, Korolyov began collecting articles from American newspapers on U.S. plans to launch a satellite into space. “The only way to convince the Soviet government to launch a space satellite was to say, ‘The Americans are thinking of doing this. We need to do it, too,’” Siddiqi said.

Siddiqi obtained declassified correspondence in which the Korolyov used the clippings to persuade Khrushchev to give him “a couple of rockets” for space instead of for weapons. Within two years, Sputnik was ready: On Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviets sent the first satellite into space, beating America to the punch.

Even then, Siddiqi said, Khrushchev was nonplussed. Interviews with Khrushchev immediately after successful orbit, said Siddiqi, showed the Soviet leader’s reaction to Sputnik to be “lukewarm” at best.

But when the Western press splashed the news on front pages with the bold, banner headline, “SPUTNIK LAUNCHED,” the Soviets suddenly paid attention. “The Soviets reacted to the reaction,” Siddiqi said. “Once the Russians saw that Korolyov’s side project had caused a global furor, they appropriated and exploited it.”

Today, Tsiolkovsky and Korolyov are national heroes in Russia, with their likenesses found on public monuments across the nation. In fact, the town of Kaliningrad was changed to Korolyov in 1996, and the 1987 ruble bore an image of Tsiolkovsky, who has a namesake crater on the moon.

“Under a very strong, repressive government, you’d expect that popular enthusiasm wouldn’t play a role,” Siddiqi said. “But with regard to the space race, I found that popular support played a huge part.”

In fact, he said, the Russian venture into space couldn’t have happened without it.

“You need both the science and the utopianism, the amateur groupsand the government,” he concluded, “and perhaps even a little irrational justification.”

Working on The Red Rockets’ Glare has inspired some side projects. These include an analysis of the bourgeoning Indian space program and a further historical account of Soviet scientists who did their research in internment camps under Stalin.

“To write the histories of those repressed societies, it is not enough to write just about the leaders,” Siddiqi said. “It is as—if not more—important to take the challenge of recording the lived experiences of the ordinary people.”

– Janet Sassi

Father Saju was sponsored on his visit to New York by Fordham University’s Campus Ministry and hosted by Father George Drance, S.J., of the Department of Theatre and Visual Arts. A photo essay of Father Saju’s performance will appear in the October issue of INSIDE FORDHAM.