Nominated by their fellow alumni, the award winners were selected by the FUAA Advisory Board. The Ram of the Year Award honors alumni who enhance the reputation of the University through their professional achievements, personal accomplishments, and loyal service to Fordham, and the Trailblazer Award is given to a graduate from the past 10 years who has demonstrated outstanding dedication to Fordham and whose leadership has inspired fellow alumni.

Ensuring College Isn’t a Luxury

Osman, the director of alternatives at Wellington Management, previously served as associate and global alternatives product specialist at JPMorgan Asset Management. He was able to afford Fordham with financial aid and support from the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP). And that’s why it’s important to him to pay it forward to other students like him.

“I owe a lot to Fordham, and that’s why I give back however I can,” he told Fordham Magazine in 2020. “There’s a kid in my shoes out there, a kid from the Bronx who isn’t afforded the luxury of being able to pay for college, and that sucks. We should be able to help them out.”

Osman and his family settled in the Bronx when he was a child, having fled Sudan amid military unrest when he was just 3 years old. Today, he’s grateful to Fordham for the “profound impact” it’s had on his life.

“The University has helped mold me into who I am today,” he said. “I can trace my professional success back to that Jesuit curriculum and to my first work-study job at Walsh Library.”

Since graduating, Osman has remained close to the University, by sponsoring receptions for Fordham alumni who work at JPMorgan, for example, serving as a member of the FUAA Advisory Board, and helping launch the Alumni Career Fair.

Osman said he is “deeply grateful for this recognition” and is indebted to Fordham’s faculty and staff for being so dedicated to his “education and personal growth.

“Without their encouragement and belief in me, I would not have been able to accomplish all that I have,” he said.

Cementing Future Opportunity

For decades, the Waltons have been proponents of Catholic education, generously donating their time and resources to make it more accessible to underserved populations.

Jeanette, a native Bronxite, said the Catholic Church shaped her early years, in particular. “[We] didn’t have a lot of money, we didn’t have a lot of the extras, so your life really centered around the church because the church had … all kinds of things,” like an afterschool program, free lunch, and more, she told Fordham’s Bronx Italian American History Initiative in 2019.

After graduating from Cardinal Spellman High School in 1967, she enrolled in Thomas More College, then Fordham’s undergraduate school for women. She earned a B.S. in biology in 1971, and two years later, added an M.S. in the subject from Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. As an undergraduate, she worked on the yearbook staff, eventually becoming editor-in-chief. That’s where she met Jack. She was a sophomore, and he was a first-year student from Ohio, where he had attended St. Ignatius High School in Cleveland.

They were married in the 1970s, and they have stayed close to Fordham through the decades. Two of their three sons—Robert, GABELLI ’01, and Andrew, FCRH ’05—followed in their Fordham footsteps, each earning a degree from the University. And Jack has served as president of the Fordham College Alumni Association.

In 2012, he and Jeanette founded the John C. and Jeanette D. Walton Lecture in Science, Philosophy, and Religion at Fordham “to address the complex issues at the intersection” of the three subjects “in conversations that reach beyond the confines of academia.”

Members of the Archbishop Hughes Society, a group of Fordham’s most magnanimous donors, their support has enriched the University community in numerous ways. They are the principal benefactors of the statue of St. Ignatius Loyola at the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses, as well as of the Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam organ in the University Church. They have contributed to the restoration of science labs at Rose Hill, and in 2017 they established the Walton Scholarship Fund, which provides financial aid to high-achieving undergraduates who might otherwise be unable to continue attending Fordham.

A few years ago, the Waltons hosted a presidential reception in Ohio, and they have long been involved in planning Jubilee reunion activities, including outreach to fellow alumni. Jack has served as co-chair of all the reunions of his class since graduating, including his 50th last June.

At the Golden Rams Dinner and Soiree on Friday evening, June 3, he told Fordham News that his fondest Fordham memory was commencement, when he earned a B.S. in chemistry that would enable him to pursue a successful career.

“I felt so lucky to be getting my degree because it was not a given,” he said. “Well, in my mind it was a given, but I still felt very, very lucky.”

This year’s FUAA Recognition Reception will be held on Wednesday, January 18, at the Penn Club of New York from 6 to 8 p.m. Register for the reception on Forever Fordham.

For Guy Consolmagno, S.J., it has been both, perhaps in equal doses. In a talk on the Fordham campus on Feb. 26, Brother Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory, said that religion and science enjoy a long partnership in humans’ endeavor to understand the world in which they live.

“Studying science is an act of worship,” said Brother Consolmagno, a graduate of MIT, former Peace Corps volunteer, author, and research astronomer. “You have to have faith in the questions you are asking.”

Delivering the John C. and Jeanette D. Walton Lecture in Science, Philosophy, and Religion, Brother Consolmagno drew parallels between an unlikely pair: Galileo, a Renaissance man who created the telescope and changed science forever, and Pope Francis, whose concern for climate change’s effects on the world’s poor is aimed at reinvigorating the Catholic mission.

“Galileo Would Have Been On The Colbert Show”

Had he been born in the 20^th century rather than the 16^th, Galileo would have been world-renown, “a media star … just like Carl Sagan,” said Brother Consolmagno. “[He] would have been on The Colbert Show, the Tonight Show.” Although Galileo’s notoriety landed him in some trouble with the church in his day, said Brother Consolmagno, his important scientific discoveries set in motion a revolution on how scientists make assumptions about the universe. It moved science from the Golden Age of celebrating book knowledge of the past, to the scientific revolution of seeking knowledge for the future.

“Galileo was special because he had the telescope and was able to see and understand what he was seeing . . . the moon’s craters . . . the Orion Nebula,” said Brother Consolmagno. “And he was seeing things that were not in any book.”

“He understood why it mattered, and he knew it was important to tell the world.”

Laudato Si’: What Pope Francis Sees

Brother Consolmagno called the pope’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, an entreaty that doesn’t settle scientific questions but draws on today’s scientific research to conclude “the environment is reaching a breaking point that will cause a change in humanity that cannot be fixed by technology.” Francis says these ecological problems are symptoms of much deeper social justice issues, “symptoms that come out of personal sins” and our detachment from God.

“The pope is [offering]new assumptions, just as Galileo saw a new set of assumptions in how the universe works,” he said.

The pope’s call to action, said Brother Consolmagno, is for human beings to develop a new set of ethics, “a new idea of what is wrong” in the human relationship to nature and human ecology. Nature, like the human, is a creation of God; therefore it is mankind’s to care for like a sibling, not to own.

Nor are humans gods who can fix ecological degradation through technology, he said. Technology advances over time, but human ethics tend to waver: a technologically-advanced society may not necessarily solve the earth’s problems.

“Ask yourself who had better ethics: Nazi Germany? Or Socrates?”

By calling for a change in our humanity, the pope’s encyclical does much to demonstrate why science needs faith, said Brother Consolmagno.

“How do we know what change will be for the better? Ultimately, the Jesuit answer is, if it brings us—human beings who will never be God—closer to God.”