Dear Members of the Fordham Family,

It gives me great pleasure to welcome back John J. Cecero, S.J., as Fordham’s new vice president for Mission Integration and Ministry, as of August 2, 2021. Father Cecero succeeds Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., who has held the post since January 1, 2016, under a slightly different title.

Please note that Father Cecero’s position title reflects a renaming of the Division of Mission Integration and Planning. It will now be titled the Division of Mission Integration and Ministry.

Father Cecero’s return to Fordham follows six years of service as the provincial of the USA Northeast Province of the Society of Jesus. He previously served at the University as an associate professor of psychology from 1998 to 2013 and is a tenured member of the psychology faculty here. He was a member of the Fordham Board of Trustees from 2008 to 2014, serving as chair of its mission and identity committee, and was the rector of the Fordham Jesuit Community from 2007 to 2013.

He received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in 1996; master’s of divinity and theology degrees in 1988 and 1989, respectively, from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology (now the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry); and a bachelor’s degree in French and philosophy from Gonzaga University in 1982. He was ordained to the priesthood in June 1989.

Father Cecero completed a one-year clinical internship at the Boston VA Hospital and a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship in substance abuse treatments at Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry. He continues to give workshops and presentations on spirituality, addiction, mental health, and inspirational leadership to clergy and religious. He has published widely on lifetrap theory and practice, and he is the author of Praying Through Our Lifetraps: A Psycho-Spiritual Path to Freedom, a book-length guide published in 2002 by Resurrection Press. He is also the author of a series of audio presentations that were produced in 2009 under the title Spirituality, Psychology and Virtue: A Catholic’s Guide to a Flourishing Life.

As vice president for Mission Integration and Ministry, Father Cecero is responsible for the advancement of the Jesuit and Catholic mission of the University, in collaboration with other departments and offices across the University. In this role, he oversees the Office of Campus Ministry, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, and the Center on Religion and Culture.

I want to thank Father McCarthy for his long and transformative service as vice president for Mission Integration and Planning—the first person to serve in that expanded role. Father Mick, as most of Fordham knows him, has been a steady presence and a good friend. He is a well-liked and highly respected colleague, and we will miss him greatly. He will be taking a one-year sabbatical before moving on to a new assignment at the request of his provincial.

In Father Cecero we have a leader of intellectual substance, strong faith, and deep understanding of the human condition. He is an accomplished academic, administrator, and author, and a highly regarded psychotherapist. I look forward to working with him on the cabinet for his wise counsel and warm collegiality, and I believe he is exactly the right choice to lead Mission Integration and Ministry following the turbulent academic year we have just completed. I know you all join me in giving him a warm welcome back to Fordham.

Sincerely,

Joseph M. McShane, S.J.

Appropriate for this time of uncertainty—the event was one of the last held on campus before the University canceled events due to the new coronavirus—the day’s keynote lecture focused on anxiety and environmental stressors. David Marcotte, S.J., associate professor of psychology, known for his teachings on the psychology of well-being, was asked to deliver the Romero Lecture, sponsored by the Romero Center of Camden, New Jersey. Teresa Garibay, director of the Romero Center Ministries, said it was the first time a Romero lecture was given outside of South Jersey and not to their local supporters. For several years, students from Fordham volunteered with the center’s Urban Challenge Program, a service-learning retreat that brings students into contact with Camden’s underserved communities. Fordham students who participated in the program over winter break were on hand to welcome Romero Center staff to campus.

“We have had a relationship with Fordham for years, but for this lecture, it is a very different audience,” she said. “It’s nice to see professors and students who came and volunteered in January.”

Father Marcotte’s lecture followed the panel of Fordham professors who discussed how they were integrating community-engaged scholarship into their classrooms. He encouraged the audience to foster a “culture of engagement,” but he reminded participants to maintain their own well-being. Seeing the need and suffering of fellow community members can take a toll on students and faculty alike, he said.

He said humankind has made significant progress, including a global poverty rate that dropped from 90% in 1900 to 10% today and a literacy rate of 90% worldwide for those under 25 years of age. And yet, while global challenges have become more integrated, worldwide responses have become more fragmented.

“We may enjoy many advances, but they’re not universal,” he said.

He noted that 91% of American young people from 15 to 21 years of age experience some physical or emotional symptoms of stress. Anecdotally, he said, his own students say they are under a lot of stress in school, but mostly affected by factors off-campus. Specifically, he cited an American Psychological Association study that found that 75% of young people are scared of mass shootings, 57% are concerned about deportation, and 53% experienced sexual harassment. He emphasized that the World Health Organization defines well-being not simply as an absence of disease or physical harm, but also of being mentally well with the ability to thrive. He charged the crowd with taking care of themselves first before going about their business of engaging with others.

“In building programs for both students and for the community, the more you can focus on building on strengths and abilities, I think you’ll get further down the road than trying to fix weaknesses later,” he said.

It’s a notion that Arto Woodley, Ed.D., executive director of Community Engaged Learning, referred to as an “asset-based approach” to community engagement.

“Community leaders are not waiting for us to save them,” he said. “Their needs will always exist and we don’t have the capacity to help that, but the question should be, ‘How can we strategically combine our assets with their assets to build great capacity?”

He noted that many of the professors who participated in the morning session found that by teaming with community organizations, they and their students developed as “humble listeners.”

Michael “Mick” McCarthy, S.J., vice president for Mission Integration and Planning, said the new service-learning courses took professors well beyond their stated disciplines.

“They’re incredibly creative and they are all moving past their own expertise in ways that are pedagogically very helpful in advancing the mission of the University,” said Father McCarthy.

But several in the audience, including Woodley, said they hoped the symposium would advance service learning beyond the perception of novelty courses.

“The faculty need more incentives than disincentives, but they have all these barriers,” he said. “Most departments will say wait till you’re tenured before doing this kind of work, but this is an institution that says it values this work. We need to work it into the tenure system.”

Jackie Reich, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies and member of the Reimagining Higher Education Initiative, echoed a recent talk at the University given by Cathy N. Davidson, Ph.D., author of The New Education (Basic Books, 2017). Davidson suggested reworking the academic reward system so that there is parity between all aspects of a faculty member’s work.

“We need to restructure the academic reward system of teaching, research, and service so that they’re not separate silos,” said Reich. “We need to bring those all together and I think community-engaged learning and scholarship provides such a great model for that. We need to create a reward system for faculty who do this kind of work because it is so labor-intensive.”

An afternoon session examined the very specific angle of community-engaged learning with a panel of scholars teaching and researching within the criminal justice system. Professors from Columbia University, Nassau Community College, Pace University, Fordham, and the nonprofit Prison-to-College Pipeline discussed the challenges and opportunities of each of their programs.

The symposium wrapped up with a breakout session of roundtable conversations focused on defining engaged scholarship specifically at Fordham. Fordham College at Rose Hill junior Nathaniel Guenther went so far as to say that community-engaged learning should become part of the core curriculum, particularly for first-year students.

“I was able to voice my opinions on what community-engaged learning has meant to me in the past and what improvements can be made on in the future,” he said of the session. “To have my opinions heard by Fordham alumni and professors looking to expand these kinds of courses was helpful for both parties.”

His arrival at Fordham in 2016 came with a host of changes, most of which were focused on Fordham’s current and future identity. Most notably, changes began with the name of his division, which was renamed from Mission and Ministry to Mission Integration and Planning.

“The term mission and ministry can suggest that for people to be engaged in the mission and identity of Fordham, they must be part of a small subset of people in campus ministry—and I just don’t believe that’s true,” said Father McCarthy, who has worked or studied at Stanford, Santa Clara, Oxford, the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, and Notre Dame. “I believe that everybody owns the mission, that everybody is responsible for advancing the mission, and what we really need from somebody in my position is the ability to connect with larger groups of people rather than just ‘the choir,’” he said.

“Let’s be honest, we are planning, in some respects, for a time in which there are going to be fewer Jesuits here. So to be able to share that mission through well-structured programs with colleagues is very important.”

And while Campus Ministry—and ‘the choir’—remain central to the heart and soul of the division, he said, the larger effort is to help everyone, from faculty to staff to students, to understand what it means to be part of a Jesuit university and to create space for them to contribute, in ways that connect to their own core beliefs and commitments.

Being of and for New York

With its motto “New York is my campus, Fordham is my school,” the University affirms its commitment to the city, said Father McCarthy, and as a Jesuit institution, we should be particularly committed to the city’s marginalized and underserved.

“I believe that programmatically and organizationally, Fordham can do an even better job at helping faculty and students engage with our neighbors,” he said. “Both Dorothy Day and Global Outreach were doing excellent jobs programmatically—but they were limited to specific roles. I felt if we incorporated a larger view that connected more with faculty members, then they could include community engaged learning as part of their courses.”

In the fall of last year, Father McCarthy’s office launched the Center for Community Engaged Learning, building on the local legacy of the Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice. The work of the former Dorothy Day Center now falls under the new center’s umbrella, as does the cultural outreach and service learning program, and Urban Plunge, the pre-orientation program that introduces first-year students to the city through service. All of the programs address who Fordham is, he said, and the new structure helps them facilitate what Fordham can become.

He spoke of a recent visit to the U.S. Mexican border with faculty members that spurred conversations of how academic research—regardless of the field—can help contribute to the University’s stated concern for immigrants in the United States and globally.

In Tune with Strategic Planning

Father McCarthy said his department will work in tandem with Fordham’s strategic planning processes, particularly where issues of social justice are concerned.

“I don’t think any of us has an exact script for what we’ll be doing, but through CUSP (Continuous University Strategic Planning), we can keep ethical dimensions of education on our horizon,” he said. “It is an important part of what it means to be Fordham University,” he said.

And while Mission Integration and Planning is geared toward the undergraduate experience, engaging faculty overlaps with the graduate-level experience as well.

“It’s true that I have tended to focus on undergraduate education, both in my own background and because that’s what I know best, but I’ve found my colleagues in the professional schools to be tremendous advocates of justice, concern for the environment, and for the marginalized,” he said. “They’re all pretty deeply invested in developing professionals who are going to be ethical citizens of the world. I have a lot of faith in our deans as well as in the faculties of our professional schools, they really do want to foster a more just, sustainable society.”

Regardless of the school, Father McCarthy said an important part of his role is to help faculty, particularly those who have had no experience at a Jesuit university or a faith-based institution, to integrate mission into their work. That is where the CUSP process can be enormously effective, he said. It can help set up development programs, both for faculty and staff and trustees, so that they can deepen their understanding of the Jesuit mission.

“I think it’s important to be a diligent member of this larger CUSP process; I’m not currently on the CUSP committee, but I’m constantly brought back into it,” he said. “At a practical level, that means I’m willing to contribute to those efforts, whatever they may be at any particular moment. What we’re doing is increasing coordination and planning.”

Supporting Faculty

Planning includes faculty seminars, retreats, and immersion experiences—such as the one to the border, where ways of thinking about the mission of the University become less abstract and more grounded in an experience of academic community. Through the provost’s office, Father McCarthy set up a dean’s Ignatian forum, where academic deans of the University come together four times a year to talk about how they can contribute to the larger Jesuit mission.

He said his division can provide plenty of platforms from which professors can integrate with the community, from Global Outreach to volunteering at POTS, a local community service organization near the Rose Hill campus. He added that another future goal would be to provide training on how to build a community-engaged learning curriculum.

“Faculty members need pretty significant support to understand how to do this and then in the implementation, they need support connecting with real members of the community,” he said. “My hope is that the Center for Community Engaged Learning can promote this in a very dynamic way alongside very dynamic pedagogy, to truly make New York ‘my campus.’”

But, he added, the focus is not limited to New York. He said that through Global Outreach, professors can potentially incorporate curriculum. A GO! trip to Ecuador could be part of a Spanish class or an economics class.

“Our hope would be that we think more expansively so that faculty members can use us as a resource to connect their students to local and global realities,” said Father McCarthy. “We’re just beginning, but there are more possibilities for connection, for integration, than we had ever allowed ourselves to imagine.”