His acceptance was especially joyous for his parents, neither of whom had been able to go to college. Later, when he brought them to the Rose Hill campus, “you could see how proud they were that I was going there. And I felt exactly the same way,” he said. “So I developed a love for Fordham that never left me.”
That love stayed in the background during the busy decades following his 1969 graduation from Fordham College at Rose Hill as an English major. Within two years he was a newly married father of twins. He went into banking, earning an MBA from Pace University at night, and built a successful executive career at firms including American Express; Black Rock Capital, which he co-founded; and Cannon Capital Ltd.
Over the past few decades, he has come back to Fordham in a number of roles: He is a longtime trustee and former member of the President’s Council who has often visited Fordham classrooms and spoken at student-focused University events. He was an advisory board member for Fordham’s programs in London, where he and his family lived for 20 years. He is a 2011 recipient of the Fordham Founder’s Award, and he is also a Fordham parent—of the four children born to him and his late wife, Jane M. Flaherty, two are Fordham graduates.He is also a generous donor to the University. Among their other gifts to Fordham, he and Jane established two scholarship funds: one named for Roy E. Haviland, GABELLI ’69, a Navy pilot and classmate of Jim’s who was killed in a midair collision off the coast of North Vietnam in 1973, and one named for Jane Flaherty, to which he is making a new contribution. Jim serves on the committee for Fordham’s current campaign, Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, which seeks to raise $350 million for priorities including access and affordability.
Those were always key priorities for the Flahertys—as an undergraduate, Jim faced financial challenges that nearly derailed his Fordham education. His own struggles informed the Flahertys’ commitment to giving scholarship support to students who, by now, number in the dozens.
Who is someone at Fordham who made a difference for you?
Father George McMahon [former dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill and namesake of McMahon Hall on the Lincoln Center campus]probably had the biggest impact on me when I met with him in junior year. I had ripped my knee up playing baseball at Fordham and had withdrawn from school for a semester, which was exciting because it meant I lost all my scholarships. Then my father had a stroke when I was beginning my junior year. I had to really juggle things around—because I didn’t have much money and because one parent was no longer able to work, I went to work on Wall Street, at the Bank of New York, running a collating machine that processed mutual fund statements.
And so I had to go see Father McMahon to talk about things, and he did me a world of good. I didn’t think I was going to be able to stay at the University, but he did all sorts of things for me that let me hold on to my scholarships, and he also let me fit classes into my work schedule. He went out of his way to make sure that I stayed in school, and I wound up, fortunately, graduating on time.
How did your undergraduate experience impact your giving?
My last two years at Fordham were a bit of a blur—I worked from midnight to eight o’clock in the morning, came up to Rose Hill, did my classes, went home to Brooklyn, slept for four hours, and then went back to Wall Street and worked from midnight until eight o’clock again. So it wasn’t exactly the kind of educational experience I think you’d want anybody to have. I don’t want anybody to ever have to go to Fordham the way I did.
My wife, Jane, also wanted us to support Fordham, for two reasons: Neither she nor any of her four brothers got to go to college, because their parents couldn’t afford for any of them to go. Also, she watched how hard it was for me, although she was extraordinarily supportive of what I was trying to do.
You once said she loved Fordham even more than you did. Can you elaborate?
When I was at Fordham, she was with me up on the campus every weekend, going to basketball games, all sorts of things. She had a college experience in a vicarious way, and she just loved every minute of it. In the years after I graduated, she was at Fordham fairly often with me, and then when we moved back from England, we were busy with Fordham things quite a bit.
By the way, when I was asked to go on the Board of Trustees by [Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham], I said no, for a variety of reasons. Well, if you know Father McShane, you know he doesn’t give up. So he kept asking—I’m on the phone with him, in a car with Jane, having just landed in London, and I’m saying no, and there are pauses, and Jane finally said, “What’s this all about? Give me the phone.” So I handed her the phone and Father said he wanted me to go on the board. “Oh, OK,” she said. “He’ll do that.” End of story!
What was it like meeting your scholarship recipients at Fordham’s annual Scholarship Donors and Recipients Reception?
Our scholarship recipients would show up, and my wife would sit down with them all around a table. She treated them like their mother—urging them to eat something, asking how things were going for them. Like me, they were enthralled by her. Some of them would tell her they would never have been able to come to Fordham if they didn’t have the scholarship that she gave them. In some respects, it was a little bit like repeating my history. There was one young man whose father had died two months after his acceptance to Fordham. He was a policeman who had been killed. And it was a real question, whether this young man was going to be able to attend. And so every year for four years, he’d be the first one of the scholarship recipients in the room so he could have a private conversation with Jane. When he was a senior, his mother came, and that was a pretty tearful meeting. But yes, we had several students thank us.
Roy Haviland’s sister, Dorene Prinzo, still comes to the scholarship reception every year. He was my best friend at Fordham. Who, by the way, just to make it clear, my wife had a terrible crush on before she even agreed to talk to me.
Do you have advice for today’s graduates?
I’ve told students that they had better like what they do for a living and like the people they do it with. It would be better to quit their job than to do a job they hated, because it would become obvious that they hated what they were doing, and that kind of spills over as you go look for different jobs. If you’re doing something you don’t like to do, sooner or later, you’re going to do a bad job at it.
Is there a book that had a lasting influence on you?
There are two books, and the first is The Power and the Glory. It’s a novel by Graham Greene about a Catholic priest during the repression of the church in Mexico in the 1930s, and it shows what happens if you have the intestinal fortitude to do the right things. The other book is The Wall, by John Hersey, and it’s about the ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, in World War II, and how the Poles had to outwit the Nazis simply to survive. I went to Warsaw with my oldest son, and we saw the train station where they made the Jews get on the train to the concentration camps. He still talks about that. The Wall has stuck with me forever. I have a copy of it on my nightstand.
What are you optimistic about?
I am an optimist because America’s still far and away the greatest nation in the world. I think Americans will survive and thrive on the opportunities that America creates time and time again for its citizens. I am a believer in the movement toward diversity that’s underway, and Fordham’s history is all about diversity and opportunity—we were created in 1841 because Catholics couldn’t go to university.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
My Irish Catholic mother, who doted on her only child, said, “You should marry that girl as soon as she’ll have you,” referring to Jane. Fundamentally, the most important decision I ever made was to marry my wife, and I did that in part because my mother told me to.
Jane M. Flaherty died peacefully on February 4, 2019, after an illness. On December 16, 2019, the University posthumously awarded her the Fordham Founder’s Award, noting, among other things, her dedication to the cause of Catholic education, her generosity of spirit, and the opportunities she created for the students of Fordham.
Learn more about the story behind the Roy E. Haviland Endowed Dean’s Scholarship Fund.
To inquire about supporting scholarships and financial aid or another area of the University, please contact Michael Boyd, senior associate vice president for development and university relations, at 212-636-6525 or [email protected]. Learn more about Cura Personalis | For Every Fordham Student, a campaign to reinvest in every aspect of the Fordham student experience.
]]>That was the message delivered by Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, as he kicked off the holiday season with the President’s Club Christmas Reception on Nov. 27.
The annual reception drew some 700 members of the Fordham community to the promenade of the David H. Koch Theatre at Lincoln Center, where Father McShane called upon them to soothe the sharper moments of this past year with a celebration of gratitude for God’s love.
“Auntie Mame would say ‘haul out the holly, we need a little Christmas’—but what about that holly? Why do we deck the halls with holly?”
Rich in Christian symbolism, holly is not so innocent, he said. While the green in that little sprig marks the eternal youth of Christ, the rest evokes Christ’s sacrifice.
“Early Christians also saw spikey leaves—the crown of thorns—and the red berries as the blood [Christ] shed for us,” he said. “In this difficult moment in our history, when the world is tense and the nation is polarized, I look at holly and it reminds us of the first Christmas gift—that of God’s inexplicable generosity, absolutely astounding love for us all. And on the basis of that, we hope. Because we know that God, who loves us so much, will continue to watch over us.”
Gifts to Be Thankful For
As the evening progressed, guests shared the holiday spirit by recalling some of the more meaningful gifts they’d received in their lives and were grateful for. Christopher Knight, FCRH ’16, said he was thankful for “a Fordham education.”
For Andrew Ketchum, FCRH ’09, it was a Batman Bruce Wayne Mansion he got when he was 8 years old—but not really. “It was a really cool gift for sure … but I’d actually have to say my wife,” he said.
The couple met at the Rose Hill campus’s Queens Court during their freshman year when, says Karen Hogan Ketchum, FCRH ’09, Andrew approached her asking if she knew how to make “easy mac”—macaroni and cheese.
“I thought, oh, here’s this poor guy who has no idea how to cook, let me take pity on him,” said Hogan Ketchum.
“And the line worked,” Andrew chimed in. The two were married last year in the University Church.
Board of Trustees member and 1969 alumnus James P. Flaherty, the founder and chairman of International Healthcare Investor, echoed Ketchum’s sentiment: “Definitely my wife,” said Flaherty, who has known his wife, Jane, since they were teens.
For architect Edward Stand, whose firm designed the Gabelli School of Business, the most meaningful thing he said he’d given was the gift of travel to his sons: “I love giving them the opportunity to go traveling internationally—Istanbul, Italy, Turkey, the Yucatan—that’s the best gift I can give to them.”
Soccer, Service, and Funding Student Dreams
Father McShane shared his own gratitude list, starting with Fordham’s historic NCAA championship win last weekend against Duke by the men’s soccer team. The Rams were the only unseeded team to reach the Elite Eight, and only the second team in University history to reach the final eight in a national championship tournament. They play No. 3 seeded North Carolina this weekend.
“We, who had gone into the tournament unseeded, unheralded, unrecognized, are now ranked No. 7 in the country,” he said to a burst of cheers.
He then thanked the University’s devoted faculty, staff, students who “spend themselves in the service of others,” and the University’s donors. “You are the angels on whose shoulders I stand,” he said. “Your leadership has made it possible for Fordham to raise $115 million as we roar toward our $175 million goal in the campaign Faith & Hope, which supports financial aid.”
“Even in this difficult year, I have much to celebrate and be hopeful about as we go forward.”
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The spirit of cura personalis was made manifest on March 28 at Fordham’s 10th annual Founder’s Award Dinner. The University community came together at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to honor its most devoted benefactors and brightest students.
The annual event raised $2.2 million for the Fordham Founder’s Presidential Scholarship Fund—the second-largest total in the history of the Founder’s event. In addition, the 2011 Fordham Founder’s Award was presented to James P. Flaherty, FCRH ’69, and James J. Houlihan, GSB ’74.
Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, thanked attendees for helping to raise more than $400 million for Excelsior | Ever Upward | The Campaign for Fordham, the University’s comprehensive fundraising campaign.
“Two years ago, when we gathered in this very ballroom, we announced that we had already raised $260 million toward our $500 million goal. We heard that news, and we blinked in amazement, and the world blinked with us—and sometimes at us,” Father McShane said.
“Thanks in large part to your generosity, to the devotion of our Board of Trustees, to the hard work and infectiously faith-filled vision and activity of Jim Houlihan and Jim Flaherty and their companions and colleagues on the President’s Council, I am happy to tell you that in the middle of a crippling economic downturn, we have raised $405 million, or $145 million more than we had two short years ago.”
The evening’s honorees received their awards from Father McShane and John Tognino, FCLS ’75, chairman of the Fordham University Board of Trustees.
Flaherty, an English major who went on to become chief executive for American Express’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, founded Pareto Partners, a London-based firm at which he managed $8 billion in assets. He later co-founded Black Rock Capital and today serves as managing partner of London-based Cannon Capital Partners, LLP.
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| James J. Houlihan, GSB ’74, recalls his family’s history with Fordham at the 2011 Founder’s Award Dinner. Photo by Jon Roemer |
Flaherty’s connections to Fordham run deep. He counts two children as fellow alumni, and serves as co-chairman for Fordham College at Rose Hill’s portion of the campaign. He has established two scholarship funds at Fordham—one named for his friend Roy Haviland, a Fordham graduate who was killed in Vietnam, and another for his wife of 41 years, Jane, whom he has known since they were 15 years old.
In accepting his award, Flaherty joked that it was about time Fordham acknowledged the hard work that went into his 2.5 cumulative GPA. He thanked his family members for their support and presence at the event.
“The most dedicated member of the family to Fordham is my wife, who probably loves the place even more than do I,” Flaherty said.
“I thank you for this honor; it’s particularly pleasurable to share it with Jim Houlihan,” he told Father McShane.
“I thank you very much for all the support you give to Fordham,” Flaherty said to the audience. “It makes my job as one of the chairmen of the Fordham College at Rose Hill capital campaign a heck of a lot easier, because the story of Fordham is a pretty easy story to tell.”
Father McShane responded that Flaherty’s undergraduate GPA had been eclipsed by the tremendous service and dedication he had given to his alma mater.
“You may claim to have a 2.5 GPA on your academic transcript, but those of us who know you and love you know that you have a 4.0 on the transcript of your life, for all that you have done for others,” he said.
Houlihan likewise has deep roots at Fordham. Not only did his mother earn a master’s degree and a doctorate in social work at the University, but the baseball diamond at the Rose Hill campus bears his name. Houlihan mixed his love of sports with a passion for service while an undergraduate, serving as a coach for children in the South Bronx.
After graduating from the Gabelli School of Business, he established himself at Houlihan-Parnes LLC, where his successes routinely land him on Irish America magazine’s Top 100 Business list.
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| Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, addresses the 980 guests who gathered at the Founder’s Dinner. Photo by Jon Roemer |
His humanitarian efforts garnered him the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 2000. He was instrumental in establishing the Great Hunger Memorial in Ardsley, N.Y., and served as curator for the acclaimed exhibit “The Fighting Irishmen: A Celebration of the Celtic Warrior.”
Demonstrating his love for his Irish roots, Houlihan’s acceptance speech drew upon University and family history. Like Fordham founder Archbishop John Hughes, he said, his family came to America from Ireland to pursue their dreams.
“In reading a book about our founder, I couldn’t help but think about my maternal grandmother, Rose Valerie Murray, who emigrated in 1913. She also came from County Tyrone in Northern Ireland,” he said.
“She was much like John. She believed in family; she believed in her faith; she believed in the country of her origin; and she believed in her newly adopted country, the United States of America. And like the archbishop, she believed in education.”
After dinner, attendees in tuxedos and gowns watched from tables set with elegant floral displays, as Rachel Buethe and Jake Lowenthal, senior theatre majors in Fordham College at Lincoln Center, sang Jerome Kern’s “I Won’t Dance!”
Before he introduced the 11 Presidential Scholars, master of ceremonies Bill Baker, Ph.D., the Claudio Aquaviva Chair and Journalist in Residence at Fordham, described his experience teaching a joint course between Fordham and the Juilliard School on the business of the performing arts in the 21st century.
“One of my Fordham students, a dancer, turned in a paper for a mid-term. I read the paper, and I sent her a note, and I said, ‘I’ve had a lot of M.B.A. students do studies for me, and this is perhaps the best report I’ve ever read. Have you ever thought about going into business?'” he said.
“She came into class and she said, ‘You know Dr. Baker, maybe I can do that. But there’s one thing that I want to do, and that’s dance.'”
Kevin Francisco, a senior finance major in the Gabelli School of Business, thanked the attendees for their support.
“I, like all of you, am mindful of the importance of return on investment, and I want to assure you, on behalf of all the Fordham scholars, your continued support of this scholarship fund has been, and will continue to be, put to great use,” Francisco said.
“Fordham does not end when I graduate, or when any of us graduate. We will all continue to serve the University and all of you, our benefactors, in a most positive way.”
The Founder’s Award was established in 2002 to recognize individuals whose lives reflect the University’s defining traditions as an institution dedicated to wisdom and learning in the service of others. Previous awardees include: Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Fordham’s first Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society; former New York Giants owner Wellington T. Mara, FCRH ’37, and Mario J. Gabelli, GSB ’65.
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