“Ray was consistently demanding but incredibly patient,” Doyle said of Father Schroth, a Jesuit priest, professor, and journalist who died in July 2020 at the age of 86.

A 1955 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Father Schroth was an associate professor in the communications department at the University from 1969 to 1979 and served for several years during the 1990s as an associate dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. Throughout his career, he was a mentor to dozens of students who became lifelong friends, including Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters Loretta Tofani, FCRH ’75, and Jim Dwyer, FCRH ’79.

At the memorial service, Doyle shared something Father Schroth wrote about one of his own Fordham professors, someone who had “loomed large as a Catholic intellectual 30 years before.”

“Ray wrote that he knew that ‘inside that handsome gray head and behind that gentle, courtly manner was a flame lit from the first torch ever lit and passed along at Fordham. I knew I should experience it before it flickered out.’”

Countless Fordham students and alumni have beheld that flame through the years and not only kept it from flickering out but taken up the torch and shared their own spark of light with others.

Take, for example, Bill Kiernan, a Long Island brewery owner and AP English teacher. He recently drew on two courses he took with Fordham professor Mark L. Chapman 20 years ago—the Black Prison Experience and the Black Church—to help his own students understand and join national conversations on racial justice following the killing of George Floyd.

Or consider neurochemist Nako Nakatsuka, a 2012 Fordham grad recently named one of MIT Technology Review’s “35 Innovators Under 35.” As an undergraduate, she formed a tight bond with chemistry professor Ipsita Banerjee, collaborating with her on research, motivated by a shared hunger for learning and scientific discovery.

“She was my scientific savior at a time when I was pretty lost and didn’t know how to focus my energy,” Nakatsuka said of Banerjee. “She really put in a lot of time and effort in developing my potential as a scientist.”

The Fordham family is full of such stories. Share yours with us at [email protected].

CSTEP is a statewide program that prepares minority and economically disadvantaged undergraduates for professions in areas where they are underrepresented, including STEM, health, and other licensed fields. The STEP program, similar in design, focuses on junior high and high school students. Both programs at Fordham provide academic support and counseling, internships, scholarships, and research opportunities throughout the academic year and summer. Together, the Fordham CSTEP and STEP programs serve roughly 800 Fordham undergraduates and local high school students. 

Over the past nine months, CSTEP/STEP have remained a constant in the lives of students dealing with the tricky transition to remote learning, technology glitches, and a loss of normalcy. Through reimagined ways of learning—from a virtual student lounge where students have bonded over popular games like Kahoot! and Among Us, to shorter meeting times designed to decrease screen fatigue—their programs have continued to serve students. They’ve also recently expanded their reach with new partnerships in local schools. Their events haven’t been canceled, either. This December, around 30 Fordham CSTEP alumni spoke with STEP students about their careers on a virtual panel; next January, the CSTEP program will launch its third mentoring program that pairs alumni with current students who share similar career goals. 

“Our meeting space has changed, but what really has stayed the same is our impact,” said Renaldo D. Alba, associate director of the CSTEP and STEP programs and a 2002 graduate from Fordham College at Rose Hill and its CSTEP program. “That’s something that we’re really proud of.”

The two programs have also addressed traumatic national events with special activities for students in the wake of George Floyd’s murder this past spring.

“The issues that were raised by George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement that followed it are issues that our students and my staff have personal experience with. We’ve been subjected to it or we’ve had family and friends who have,” said Michael A. Molina, director of the CSTEP and STEP programs. “We were sensitive to these issues, and we knew that we wanted to do something.” 

This past July, Mark L. Chapman, Ph.D., associate professor of African and African American Studies, spoke with STEP students about the similarities between the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and today’s world. Ashlee W. Davis, Ph.D., a supervising psychologist and coordinator for diversity, inclusion, and social justice initiatives at the Rose Hill campus, also helped students understand racial trauma, find words for their emotions, and identify strategies for self-care. 

“We want our students to understand that you should always have strong feelings about these things that happen in life: the pandemic, George Floyd, and the Black Lives Matter movement. You should feel whatever you feel. But you should also have facts and some balance when you’re looking at what’s going on,” Molina said. 

Staying ‘INSTEP’ with High School Students in the Bronx

Through virtual learning, CSTEP counselors and students have also continued to extend their pre-pandemic “INSTEP” college access initiatives to outside schools and community-based organizations, including KAPPA International School, a public school located a few blocks south of the Rose Hill campus. 

“How do you select a college or university? Should you go away? Should you stay in New York City? Should you apply to a CUNY or a SUNY or an independent school? What does living on campus look like? These are the kinds of discussions that our college students, the CSTEP students, do in small groups with the INSTEP high school kids,” Molina explained. 

Over the past two years, KAPPA students have visited the Rose Hill campus and learned about the transition from high school to college—the thing they struggle with the most—from Fordham CSTEP students who can empathize with them, said their assistant principal, Casey Smith. 

“It really hits home,” Smith said. “The kids really find it beneficial to work with college students and to have what feels like a mentor to walk them through the process.” 

Help with College Applications

This fall, the INSTEP program focused on a more timely topic for high school seniors: college application season. 

“I’ve learned signing up for FAFSA and TAP as soon as possible will help you go to college with barely any debt,” Amado Reynoso, one of the 26 KAPPA students who participated in the INSTEP program this fall, wrote in an email. “My favorite part of the program is when we did fun activities like college-themed Family Feud. It taught us more about college and stuff and financial aid, and [the Fordham counselors and students]kept it fun while doing so.” 

The virtual workshops also helped Leslie Garcia Torres navigate the financial aid process—something unfamiliar to many potential first-generation college students like herself. 

“The college process is stressful, especially if you don’t have any family members that have gone to college. It was just me, alone. I had to do the CUNY application, the FAFSA, all of that, the TAP application, by myself, but with a little bit of help,” said Torres, a high school senior from the Bronx and a Fordham STEP student. 

Among the CSTEP students co-leading the sessions was Anita Adu Manu, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill. Manu said they also discussed how to manage being a person of color in a predominantly white institution.

“These are kids who want to go abroad, in a way—outside of the city. We had to talk about that and how to find your own community,” Manu said. “We definitely used CSTEP as an example of one of these communities that other schools might have.”

‘Hey, I’ve Been In Your Shoes’

Manu said she found her own home through CSTEP. Before she became a program scholar in her sophomore year, she tagged along with her CSTEP friends to their program-sponsored biology and chemistry review sessions. She said she was also welcomed to a CSTEP potluck in her first year, even though she wasn’t officially part of the program. 

“I was able to build a community that I didn’t know I needed,” said Manu, a pre-med biology major from Van Cortlandt Village in the Bronx. “All the people I met freshman year at CSTEP are basically all my friends now.” 

She said her CSTEP counselors also helped her believe in herself. 

“There were a lot of things I didn’t know about the pre-med track, but all the counselors steered me in the right direction. And when I felt like I wanted to switch my major because I just wasn’t good enough, they reassured me. They were like, hey, I’ve been in your shoes,” Manu said, adding that many counselors are Fordham alumni, including Anya Patterson, FCRH ’19, a past Coro Fellow. 

Manu said she’s now considering becoming a sports cardiologist who travels with a soccer or football team. But at first, she wasn’t sure it was possible. 

“I felt like I was lagging behind. But when I would sneak into the review sessions,” Manu said with a laugh, “I had a boost of confidence. The professors were there. My peers were there. We were all collaborating. It made me feel like, OK, yeah. I think I can do this.”  

Thirty-Four Years of Growth 

Collectively, the CSTEP and STEP programs have been thriving at Fordham for decades. The STEP program at Rose Hill was created in 1986, while the STEP program at Lincoln Center became official in 2011. CSTEP has existed at the Rose Hill campus since 1987 and expanded to the Lincoln Center campus about 15 years ago.

“What the University has done over these past 34 years with the Rose Hill STEP program and for the past 10, 11 years with the STEP program—if you look at those numbers, you probably have somewhere between 8 and 10 thousand students over the life of these programs that have been positively impacted and who have been introduced to the possibilities of going to college and pursuing a career in a STEM, health, or licensed field,” Molina said. 

The oldest Fordham STEP graduates are now in their 40s, said Alba. The oldest CSTEP graduates are in their mid-50s. 

“These are folks that are doctors, physicians, Ph.D.s, accountants, lawyers, scientists, social workers, teachers,” said Alba, adding that many of them are originally from the Bronx. “And they proudly carry the STEP flag wherever they go.” 

Molina said the most rewarding part about their work is seeing their students as young as 11 realize their options in life and become adults. “You see these kids come in. They’re looking around like tourists … They’re wide-eyed with a lot of ideas and ambition and they’re highly motivated,” said Molina, a graduate from a similar program, the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP). “It’s really a joy to see them grow, develop, and become these really accomplished young people by the time they leave us.”

Suffice to say, this iconic short story, “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” penned by the writer Flannery O’Connor, does not end well.

On Saturday, Sept. 28, the story will be performed live at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge: Race & Grace in Flannery O’Connor,” will pair an afternoon symposium with an evening performance of the 1964 story. The event is being hosted by Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, which in May 2018 was awarded a $450,000 grant from the Mary Flannery O’Connor Trust to support programming related to the author.

The day will begin with a panel discussion from 2 to 4 p.m. in Tognino Hall. The panel will be moderated by Curran Center associate director Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., and will feature Rufus Burnett, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham; Mark Chapman, Ph.D., associate professor of African American Studies at Fordham; and Karin Coonrod, a lecturer in directing at Yale University.

The symposium will be followed by a performance of the story by international theater troupe Compagnia de’ Colombari directed by Karin Coonrod, to take place in Fordham Prep’s Leonard Theatre at 7 p.m. It will be followed by a conversation with the actors.

O’Connor and Race

O’Donnell, whose forthcoming book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor will be published next spring by Fordham University Press, said one of the reasons why this short story is so interesting is that O’Connor doesn’t paint race relations in black and white.  Instead, she creates characters who have internal complexity and who act out of mixed motivations. Everyone behaves badly, the ending of the story is tragic, and no one escapes some measure of blame.

In the story, the white woman, who has insisted her son accompany her on the bus since it was integrated, says in her conversations with him that African Americans shouldn’t mix with whites. She nevertheless engages with the son of the black woman when they sit next to them, and when she offers the boy a penny, his mother reacts with deadly fury to the white woman’s condescension.

“I’ve been teaching the story for many years, and it’s gotten more and more challenging to  discuss as the years have gone by, as we have a better sense of the tensions and dynamics that govern the relationships between African Americans and whites, both past and present,” she said.

The Myth of ‘White Innocence’

What’s complicated the task, she said, is the fact that while O’Connor possessed an ability—thanks to time spent living in the Northeast and the Midwest—to critique the white supremacy baked into the society in which she was raised, and excelled at writing about the relationship between African Americans and whites, she ultimately ascribes a quality of innocence to the benighted white woman in the story. The woman’s racism is not represented as a virulent force, based in violence and perpetuated by violence, but as a mistaken perspective.

In contrast to this, O’Donnell noted that during the same era O’Connor was writing her story, James Baldwin wrote that racial equality will only be achieved when the myth of “white innocence” is put to rest.

“That’s a concept that we in our time are getting a better handle on, but it’s not a perspective that O’Connor found compelling,” she said.

In fact, O’Donnell argues in her book that despite her best intentions, there are times when O’Connor subconsciously upholds some of the unjust racial practices of the South.

“It’s pretty clear that her sense was that the civil rights movement was very problematic, in part because of the insistence on the part of African Americans that desegregation take place immediately. For O’Connor, as for many white Southerners, the changes were happening too fast and threatened to undermine society. In addition, like most Catholics, O’Connor had a long view of history,” she said.

“[She felt that] you don’t change human nature and you don’t change society overnight by creating new laws. She thought it should be something that happens organically and slowly, and not all at once.”

The story is relevant in 2019, O’Donnell said, because it gives us an opportunity to understand how complex it was to live in that culture and in that time, to understand how fraught it was and how difficult it is for any society to change—a principle that applies to our own current cultural moment.

‘A Powerful Communal Experience’

O’Donnell attended a previous staged production of the story, which takes its dialogue verbatim from O’Connor’s pages. She said the transformation of a story read privately on the page to a drama performed publicly on the stage makes for a powerful communal experience.

“It’s a very interesting experience to witness this play, because as we are watching these characters sitting on the makeshift bus, fighting among themselves, we feel like we are on that bus, too, as it becomes a microcosm of America” she said.

“We are still fighting many of the same battles that we were fighting in 1964; they’re just no longer happening on the bus. They’re happening in other places.”

The event is free and open to the public, though registration is required. To register, visit the Curran Center’s event page.

Local nonprofit Phipps Neighborhoods, which aims to help youth and families overcome poverty, partnered with Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning, Office of Multicultural Affairs, and Office of the Chief Diversity Officer to host the event. More than 300 attendees, many of them young Bronx residents who participate in Phipps Neighborhoods programs, braved frigid temperatures to gather at the McGinley Center and reflect on how King’s message can inform contemporary activists.

“We’re happy to broaden the conversation beyond the details of Martin Luther King’s life so that we can have some serious, courageous conversation about how we can continue that legacy for justice,” said Mark L. Chapman, Ph.D., a professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham, who moderated a panel discussion at the event.

A ‘Clarion Call’ to Today’s Activists

Dianne Morales, executive director and CEO of Phipps Neighborhoods, said the event’s theme, “Courageous Conversation in Action: Creating Brave Spaces to Stand for Justice,” reflected the importance of commemorating King’s life and work with discussions that “spotlight issues where struggle is still needed,” such as racial inequities in education and employment.

In her opening remarks, Morales said King “was focused on the need for all of us to call out racism, discrimination, and inequality—to take this country to task and create change in the systems and institutions that perpetuate those disparities in our communities.”

She said that by having these conversations and working to fight these injustices, we honor his spirit.

“We recognize, moreover, that his clarion call is as relevant today as when he walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965,” she said.

Intergenerational Lessons

In his keynote speech, the Rev. Dr. C. Vernon Mason reminded the audience that King was just 26 years old when he played a pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

“I don’t want anyone to leave here today thinking Dr. King was an elder,” Mason said. “Dr. King was a very young person. Don’t let old folks tell you that you’ve got to be old to do something.”

Mason, a visiting professor at the New York Theological Seminary, drew on his own experience as a civil rights attorney in reminding older attendees that bridging generational divides is essential to carrying on the work of the civil rights movement. “Young people have something to teach us, and we certainly have something to share with them,” he said.

A panel discussion moderated by Chapman featured community leaders at the forefront of today’s civil rights struggles, including Hawk Newsome, chair of the New York chapter of Black Lives Matter; criminal justice reform advocate Vidal Guzman; and Yaniyah Pearson, director of restorative practices and equity initiatives at the New York nonprofit Ramapo for Children.

In response to a question from Chapman about mentorship, panelist Nakita Vanstory, the director of Justice Community and Justice PLUS Programs at LaGuardia Community College, said she often finds inspiration in the young people she works with. “When I feel like giving up or I feel like I’m not making a difference, I think of all the people who are silently mentoring me and I think about the difference that I’ve made in my students,” she said. “That’s where I get my motivation.”

Community Partnerships: A Foundation for Change

Arto Woodley, executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning, said the event and the conversation it inspired are “at the core” of Fordham’s mission. But, he cautioned, “Having the conversation starts the process, but by no means ends the process.” He added that working with neighbors such as Phipps Neighborhoods will help the Fordham community meet the challenge of translating intellectual discussion into concrete action and leadership.

“Our goal is that this event is beginning of something we’ll do on an annual basis,” Woodley said.

Morales said that for Phipps Neighborhoods, the collaborative nature of the event reflected “the role that the campus and University can and should play in lifting up the voices of the community it resides in.”

Engaging with the local community held special importance for Charlotte Hakikson, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill who grew up nearby in the Bronx. “I’ve always enjoyed when we have events that invite the community to our campus and allow students to interact with the community that they’re living in,” she said.

Hakikson, a theology and African American studies major, said she was excited to see young people from the neighborhood at the event because she believes it is important for students to be exposed to King’s teachings and consider how those lessons can be applied today. “He’d say that there’s more work to do,” she said. “He’d still be fighting for more equity.”

–Michael Garofalo