Dear Members of the Fordham Community,

I hope this email finds you well and safe, and enjoying as much of a summer break as possible. I am writing to let you know that Fordham has made the difficult decision of suspending all study abroad programs through the end of the fall 2020 semester, in the interest of the health and safety of our students.

For the past few months, we have been closely monitoring the COVID-19 conditions, in the 22 countries where Fordham students had planned to study abroad this fall, and studying the ongoing challenges of international travel as a result of the global pandemic. While Fordham has been working diligently to create a multi-faceted plan for social distancing, sanitation, testing, contact tracing, and isolation protocols on each of our New York campuses, it has become increasingly clear that we cannot provide this critical level of precautionary care at each of our many study abroad locations.

We continue academic planning under the presumption that Fordham will offer face-to-face and online instruction at its New York campuses in fall 2020. We are confident that we can do so while protecting the health and safety of our students, faculty and staff, subject, of course, to Governor Cuomo’s approval for reopening higher education in New York City. We will also offer the option of fully online learning for any of our students or faculty who might need to participate remotely, for a portion or all of the semester, because of health concerns, visa constraints, travel restrictions, etc.

In preparation for restarting campus activities, the University formed thirteen working groups across every area of operations from COVID-19 screening and containment, dining and residential life, student experience and experiential learning, and infrastructure and sanitation, among others. A website provides the charge and membership of each working group and gives you the opportunity to direct questions or concerns to any of the thirteen working groups. The working groups are coordinated by a steering committee that is developing a comprehensive University-wide plan. Fordham’s restart plan will be published and shared with students, faculty, and staff in late June.

We are currently accepting study abroad applications for the spring 2021 semester and look forward to restarting our study abroad programs when the public health situation permits us to do so. Students who had planned to study abroad this semester can instead pursue their fall studies at Fordham and consider deferring study abroad to a future semester, with priority placement.

As we prepare to offer a transformative education for our students this fall semester, please know that the health and well-being of every member of the Fordham community are of principal importance to us.

Sincerely,

Dennis C. Jacobs, Ph.D.
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Erik Angamarca needed a backup plan. He had studied in Beijing during his junior year at Fordham and loved it—the food, the culture, the people. Passionate about travel and public service, multilingual, and long set on joining the U.S. diplomatic corps, he applied to the State Department’s Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship Program in pursuit of his dream.

The program turned him down.

“I was sort of bummed,” Angamarca says. “My ‘Plan A’ was to apply for the Foreign Service.”

He went on to graduate from Fordham in 2014 with a degree in international political economy and a minor in Mandarin Chinese. Looking back, he realizes he wasn’t quite ready—but he also wasn’t prepared to give up.

So, the summer after graduation, he applied on a whim to teach English in South Korea through the Council on International Educational Exchange. “I didn’t know one word of Korean, but I’d just been to China and China was great,” he says. “I thought, ‘Let me get that experience overseas and learn more about Asia.’”

And learn he did. During his two-year teaching stint, Angamarca spent four months exploring East Asia—backpacking through the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Indonesia. He lodged in temples and volunteered at an elephant sanctuary.

The experience paid off. Late last year, Angamarca earned a Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Graduate Fellowship, which will support his training for the Foreign Service. He recently began graduate studies at Georgetown University.

An Early Interest in Diplomacy

Angamarca wants to become an ambassador, and even though he’s years away from that goal, he has already gotten a few tastes of what it’s like to represent America abroad. He got the travel bug at age 10, after leaving New York to spend two years in his parents’ native Ecuador, where he realized that he liked trying new things (roasted guinea pig, anyone?) and first envisioned himself as a diplomat.

“Even at that age, you get a lot of questions,” recalls Angamarca, whose flawless manners and quiet self-assurance seem like a natural fit for a career in diplomacy. “‘How is New York?’ ‘What does snow feel like?’ Teaching them about Thanksgiving. I didn’t know until years later that I was representing the U.S.”

Another experience followed his adventures in South Korea and East Asia. After returning to the U.S. in 2016, he reconnected with Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowships, which helped him earn a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to Taiwan. He spent the 2017–2018 academic year there, not only teaching English to grammar school students but also introducing them to American traditions like Halloween costumes and candy canes.

As he pursues his studies at Georgetown on the Rangel fellowship, supporters have cheered him on, including his parents, his younger sister, and Patricia Scroggs, a retired Foreign Service officer who directs the Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Program. She’s known Angamarca since he participated in the organization’s undergraduate scholars program.

“From the time I met Erik, I thought, he is such a natural diplomat, is interested in so many things, and interacts so well with people,” says Scroggs, also noting his adaptability and resourcefulness. “He has done the kinds of things he’ll be called upon to do as a Foreign Service officer.”

When Angamarca applied for this year’s Rangel fellowship, which provides full financial support for the two years of diplomatic studies, he was one of 30 people chosen from among 550 applicants.

“I’m already planning to be there at his ambassadorial swearing-in ceremony,” says Scroggs, seeing into the future, to the culmination of Angamarca’s dreams.

He’s on track to graduate in 2020 and must stay in the diplomatic corps until at least 2025.

“I’ve always told the director it’s not a five-year commitment for me,” Angamarca says. “I definitely want to stay in the Foreign Service for a while. It’s needed now more than ever.”

—Julie Bourbon

Half a world away, China would seem a difficult place with which to forge close and lasting partnerships.

In fact, that is just what Fordham is doing. From research collaborations to joint degree programs, Fordham has spent the last several years partnering with universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and other areas.

“I’m extremely proud of our global outreach,” said Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., provost of the University and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

“Fordham has a deep, rich, and longstanding partnership with Peking University in Beijing. This relationship has served as the foundation for our international initiatives in China, where we offer critical programs to international students and opportunities for faculty and students alike.”

In this sense, Fordham is in the vanguard of a national trend. Colleges and universities across the country are reporting that the number of students matriculating from China has reached an unprecedented high.

As of fall of 2012 at Fordham, Chinese non-immigrant students—ones who will repatriate after graduating—account for more than half of international students. Overall, these 164 undergraduates and 599 graduate students make up more than 5 percent of the student body.

According to the Office of International Services, this number has grown almost 150 percent since 2006.

With equal zeal, Fordham has reached out to Chinese colleges and universities in an effort to cultivate relationships.

Fordham formed its first partnership nearly 15 years ago in 1998. At that time, Ronald Anton, S.J., established the Beijing International MBA program (BiMBA) at Peking University’s National School of Development, one of China’s most prestigious institutions of higher education.

“This was the first time the Chinese Ministry of Education permitted a foreign university to confer a foreign degree on Chinese domestic students,” said David Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA), where 30 percent of students are Chinese nationals.

In response to rising demand, GBA and Peking launched a jointly administered Master of Science in Global Finance in 2010. Underwritten by a $1 million grant from the NASDAQ OMX Educational Foundation, the program’s curriculum begins in Beijing and concludes in New York. Just three years later, the program has nearly 150 alumni.

In September, GBA and Peking University began another joint degree program, the Master of Science in Investor Relations. Also funded by NASDAQ OMX, the program is co-taught by GBA and Peking faculty members. Several other new programs are under consideration in areas such as health care management, big data business analytics, and entrepreneurship.

The two universities are developing strong research collaborations. This spring, faculty members will participate in a joint research colloquium, which will eventually become a biannual gathering.

“The feedback on the two courses has been off-the-charts positive,” Gautschi said. “I think this is going to raise our profile quite significantly and will acquaint our faculty with contemporary issues in China.”

About 600 miles south, in Jiangsu Province, China’s Southeast University also recently joined with GBA. The joint degree in global finance commenced last year, while the investor relations program is on its way.

These partnerships are critical as China continues to enhance its growing presence on the world stage.

“This is the most remarkable development that has taken place in the last several centuries, and it has happened so quickly,” Gautschi said. “China is becoming more and more integrated into the world economy, and businesses are going to have to figure out how to function across the political frontiers.

“There are a whole host of research questions for our faculty—how China is going to navigate this transition and how receptive the environment will be for finance as we understand it in the West.”

With a rapidly growing economy comes a heightened demand for social services. The Chinese government reports that by 2020, it will increase its number of social workers tenfold, from the current 200,000 to 2 million.

“The Chinese government has a vision of becoming more modern, more democratic, more responsive to social needs, soit wants to push social work as a profession,” said Qin Gao, Ph.D., associate professor at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

Anticipating this boom in the field, GSS is working to connect with Chinese social work schools to prepare faculty and future social workers. In 2010, the school formally joined with China Youth University for Political Science (CYU), which boasts the first and largest school of social work in mainland China. Since then, GSS faculty members have traveled to Beijing several times to teach courses, offer professional training to social work educators and practitioners, and exchange research.

Last summer eight students from CYU traveled to Fordham for a course, Frontiers of Social Work Theory and Practice in the United States.

“Even though they’re social work majors in China, the profession is very new,” Gao said. “They don’t have the opportunity to see how social work actually works, but here they met over 100 social work educators, practitioners, and clients.”

GSS and six other universities have been selected for a national initiative to help China prepare its projected 2 million new social workers. The China Collaborative, established by the U.S. Council on Social Work Education and the China Association of Social Work Education, will pair these seven American social work schools with Chinese schools to develop master of social work programs.

“The world is becoming global, and the distance is disappearing quickly,” Gao said. “For GSS, China is a unique opportunity.”

GSS and GBA are joined in their efforts by Fordham Law, which has an existing student exchange program with China University of Political Science and Law and an emerging program with Fudan University in Shanghai.

In October, the school announced a partnership with the Chinese Business Lawyers Association (CBLA), becoming the first law school to be an institutional member of the group. As such, Fordham students will gain exposure to the Asian legal field through mentoring programs and CBLA events.

“China is an important emerging market that can’t be ignored, certainly not in the law world,” said Toni Fine, assistant dean for international and non-JD programs, who said that 20 percent of current students in the L.L.M. program are from China.

“Between the number of students coming here from China, and the amount of work generated from the region, it’s important to have a better understanding of their culture and legal system,” she said.

Under the direction of the provost, Fordham has joined with other American Jesuit universities to explore forming a four-year undergraduate liberal arts college in Hong Kong. The school, which could generate future student and faculty exchanges, would be the first Jesuit university in China.

“A university in the 21st century has to see China as being something it needs to understand, because there is a remarkable evolution that’s taking place and we’re obliged to know about it,” Gautschi said.

Fordham University may be expanding its global presence overseas, but its own summer session has strengthened its international presence right here at home.

The program, which consists of two back-to-back summer semesters, has attracted a new crop of students from South Africa’s University of Pretoria (UP), this summer to participate in Fordham’s Emerging Markets and Country Risk Analysis program.

The students, who are co-sponsored by the Counsul General of South Africa, live on campus during the week and do home stays on the weekend, said Booi Themeli, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics.

The exchange is part of an UP/Fordham institutional agreement that will also send Fordham students to Pretoria in August, said Themeli.

“The program offers the South African students special courses and, at the same time, gives them the American experience,” said Themeli, who said that students would visit the top New York-based financial institutions as part of their study.

Also attending Fordham’s summer program are several French students from INSEEC Business Schools in Paris and Bordeaux, who are living in Rose Hill residence halls and taking business classes required to complete their advanced degrees. Their visit is part of a long-standing exchange agreement that has brought diversity and good will to the University’s summer sessions over the years.

By way of Brooklyn Amity School, five Turkish high school students are participating in the University’s s pre-college program, which allows rising high school seniors to join Fordham students in the classroom and earn college credit.

“We have significantly more visiting and international students this year than last, and are proud to offer a transformative experience through our summer program,” said Ron Jacobson, Ph.D., associate vice president, dean of Summer Session. “Spending a summer in New York, one of the world’s most dynamic cities, can only strengthen their global perspective.”

Jacobson added that several of this year’s summer courses had an international and/or cosmopolitan slant. They include:

—   Fordham’s first class in “Twi, a Language of Ghana”, taught by Bernard Hayford, Ph.D., an African immigration scholar from Southern Connecticut State University. Fordham is the only New York City university to offer Twi, which is widely spoken among the City’s West African immigrants;

—    Special emphasis on coverage of the World Cup Tournament in Fordham ‘s 11th annual “Sports Communication Institute,” offering hands-on experience in the art of sports writing, broadcasting, sports marketing, and effective sports public relations;

—   “Sustainable New York,” an intensive summer workshop in big city “green” design, including visits to buildings, parks, and construction sites and a visit to the Science Barge in the Hudson River.

For a complete list of Fordham’s Summer Session II offerings visit Fordham.edu/summer.