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.

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 I had ripped my knee up playing baseball at Fordham and had withdrawn from school for a semester, which was exciting because it meant I lost all my scholarships.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.

“It’s a historic year, the first time in our history that we had two authors honored, and the first time we’ve had two women honored,” said Father McShane, who presented the award to Kerri K. Greenidge, Ph.D., for her biography Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter and Lesley M. M. Blume, Ph.D.,  for FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, about war correspondent John Hersey.

The award ceremony for The Sperber Prize, given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, a critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow, took place via Zoom on Wednesday night. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the prize and its $1,000 award were established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional; it has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Beth Knobel. Ph.D., associate professor of communication and media studies and director of the Sperber Prize, said this year’s winning biographies were so well written and researched that the award had to be given to both authors. The winners will each receive $500 as prize money. 

Both winners were asked about their inspirations and the research behind the behind writing their books. Both shared that they wanted to write the hidden stories of investigative journalists who documented atrocities happening in their communities and in their country. 

“Black stories are always far more complex than we believe. Stories like Trotter’s ought to be as analyzed, discussed, and studied as Dubois, Garvey, King, and Malcolm X,” said Greenidge. 

“It has been my hope, with Black Radical, to reorient the scholarship toward these stories, not as a form of hagiography or racial exceptionalism, but as a way to challenge ourselves to more completely reckon with our complicated and often painful racial history,” she said.

Blume explained how the attack on journalists during the Trump era influenced her motivations for writing Hersey’s biography.

“My research coincided with the Trump era. Suddenly and shockingly, America’s best journalists were dubbed enemies of the people by Trump his followers, and journalists began to be threatened,” said Blume. “My entire life, without exaggeration, has been centered on newsrooms and my extended community of reporter colleagues is like family and then suddenly in the Trump era, my family was on a hit list,” she said.

Prompted by Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, both authors discussed journalists as vital figures in enforcing freedom of the press and how journalists are very important documenters of history.

“Trotter was warning about, responding to, protesting, and organizing [to protect]one of his goals as a journalist– to be able to hold a mirror up to nature. The press should be used this way to critique and question power,” said Greenidge.

Blume said that the subject of her book made it impossible to ignore the brutal realities of Hiroshima.

“After Hersey’s report came out, the only way that you could be oblivious to what nuclear warfare portended for humanity and what the Americans have done to win the war was through willful ignorance,” said Blume.

Father McShane shared that he was amazed that he recently discovered the hidden history of the Tulsa Massacre, written about in Black Radical. 

“You help us to see the importance and power of journalism, but also the harm of national amnesia,” said Father McShane. 

Ann’s brother, Alan Sperber, M.D., and his wife Betty offered their congratulations to the 2021 award recipients and detailed the history of the Sperber family’s close association with Fordham University since Ann’s book was published by the Fordham University Press. 

“Throughout his presidency, Father McShane has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Sperber Prize and a close friend of the Sperber family,” said Alan Sperber. 

Knobel said that they had considered over 25 books for the prize, including one from Fordham faculty. 

“Another book we considered was written by one of our own, our department chair in communication and media studies at Fordham, Amy Aronson. Her book was on the founder of the ACLU, Crystal Eastman, who also did some time as a writer, journalist, and founder of a publication. That is an astoundingly beautifully written and researched book,” said Knobel.

Father McShane said the Sperber Prize has become known for its acknowledgment and support of important biographers. 

“This has become one of the coveted prizes in the world of journalism, publishing, and research,” he said.

The Sperber Prize is given in honor of the late Ann M. Sperber, the author of Murrow: His Life and Times, the critically acclaimed biography of journalist Edward R. Murrow. One edition of that work was published by Fordham University Press, connecting the Sperber family to the University. Through the generous support of Ann’s mother Lisette, the $1,000 award was established to promote and encourage biographies and memoirs that focus on a media professional; it has been presented annually by Fordham’s Department of Communication and Media Studies since 1999.

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Studies Beth Knobel, Ph.D., director of the Sperber Prize, said that the jury decided to present the award to two books this year, as each was so deserving of the prize. The two winners will receive $500 each and are invited to speak about their works at a virtual Fordham award ceremony on November 3.

Knobel praised Black Radical for bringing the work of the Boston newspaper editor and civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter to light. “Black Radical is a revelation,” Knobel said. “William Monroe Trotter was truly a seminal figure in the civil rights movement, but his extraordinary life story had been little known by the wider public until Kerri Greenidge brought it to prominence through this book.” Trotter, a Harvard graduate, founded the Boston Guardian newspaper and used it as a platform to call for racial justice in early 20th-century America. “Black Radical is exhaustively researched, beautifully written, and extremely timely. In telling Trotter’s story, Greenidge deftly sheds new light on the entire civil rights movement from Reconstruction into the 1930s,” Knobel said. The book was published in 2020 by Liveright Books, a division of W.W. Norton.

The second winning book, FALLOUT: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World, explores how reporter John Hersey came to expose the U.S. government cover-up of the consequences of the Hiroshima nuclear explosion for The New Yorker in 1946. “FALLOUT cuts to the very core of what makes journalism a valuable public service: watchdog journalism,” Knobel explained. “Blume’s gripping narrative explains how Hersey showed that the U.S. government was lying when it said there were no ill effects from the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Blume’s archival research, done around the world, puts the reader in Hersey’s shoes and in those of his editors at The New Yorker, trying to face down systemic hypocrisy.” The book was published in 2020 by Simon & Schuster.

Kerri K. Greenidge, Ph.D., is Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora and director of the American Studies program at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Greenidge received her doctorate in American Studies from Boston University, where her specialty included African-American history, American political history, and African-American and African diasporic literature in the post-emancipation and early modern era. Her research explores the role of African-American literature in the creation of radical Black political consciousness, particularly as it relates to local elections and democratic populism during the Progressive Era. Her work includes historical research for the Wiley-Blackwell Anthology of African-American Literature, the Oxford African American Studies Center, and PBS. For nine years she worked as a historian for the Boston African American National Historic Site in Boston, through which she published her first book, Boston Abolitionists (2006).

Lesley M. M. Blume is a Los Angeles-based journalist, author, and biographer. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Paris Review, among many other publications. Her last nonfiction book, Everybody Behaves Badly, was a New York Times bestseller.

Previous winners of the Sperber Prize include Working by Robert Caro, Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Charles M. Blow, Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson, Reporter by Seymour M. Hersh, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century by Alan Brinkley, Avid Reader: A Life by Robert Gottlieb, and All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone by Myra MacPherson.  More information about the prize can be found at Sperberprize.com.

The Sperber Prize will be awarded on November 3 at 6 p.m. in a Fordham virtual ceremony that will be open to the public.

For more information, please contact Beth Knobel at [email protected] or 718-817-5041.