The funding will allow the two schools to develop courses and workshops at the intersection of business and law—fields that are inextricably connected in the real world. It will also expand the Fordham Foundry—Fordham’s small business incubator—to the Lincoln Center campus.

“The world is multidisciplinary—education cannot happen in silos,” said Donna Rapaccioli, PhD, dean of the business school. “To be successful in just about any career, you have to be able to consider things from multiple angles. Our hope with this grant is that both business and law students can take advantage of these resources and networks.”

The Foundry’s new Manhattan location will generate internships, Rapaccioli said, and help students at both schools to understand the legal and entrepreneurial aspects of launching a business.

“We are delighted that the Nasdaq grant will support the collaborative efforts of the law school and Gabelli School,” said Matthew Diller, dean of the Fordham School of Law. “It will provide important, practical opportunities for law and business students to learn about entrepreneurship—and how the tools of entrepreneurship can advance social justice.”

The grant marks another milestone in an ongoing relationship between Nasdaq and the Gabelli School, Rapaccioli said. This spring, Nasdaq’s educational exchange program brought Fordham students to its entrepreneurship center in San Francisco for 10 days of workshops, Silicon Valley corporate site visits, and networking.

The business school received a second grant early this summer. Coordinated by Greer Jason-DiBartolo, PhD, senior assistant dean for undergraduate studies, and Carey Weiss, director of sustainability initiatives, the $480,000 grant from Verizon Corporate Resources Group funded an on-campus entrepreneurial experience for high school students from under-resourced neighborhoods around the United States.

In the three-week-long program, students lived in Rose Hill campus dorms and attended workshops with Gabelli School faculty and visiting professionals. They also traveled into Manhattan for on-site visits at companies.

“The program offers a window into not only what the business world is like, but also what college life is like,” Rapaccioli said. “Some of these high school students would be first-generation college graduates, and the idea of the program is to inspire them to want to go to college. It’s allows us at the Gabelli School to play a small role in potentially transforming these young people’s lives.”

The unveiling of “World Program,” a partnership between GBA, Clipper Ventures, Talent Q, Ashridge Business School, and Beijing International MBA (BiMBA) at Peking University, was followed by a forum “Business in the New World: The Relevance of Geo Politics.”

“We are taking determined steps to reposition the school for the pressures and needs of the moment and make the school a world business school,” said David Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of the GBA.

“As great as New York City is, and as great an asset as it is to be situated right in the heart of New York City, we have to recognize that the world is unfolding in very exciting, dramatic and even in some cases disturbing ways, and we are obliged to understand the world of business well beyond the comfort that is within the boundaries of New York City.”

Earlier in the day, participants visited the North Cove Marina in Battery Park City to view the preparations for the Clipper Race yachts’ departure for the last leg of its 40,000-mile race around the globe. The year-long circumnavigation, which draws 650 crew members from 41 nations, is meant to impart leadership and teamwork skills for business leaders who have no previous sailing expertise.

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The Clipper fleet passed through New York harbor as part of a trip around the world. Contributed Photo

Speakers at the forum tackled a wide array of topics connected to geopolitics. Jonathan Story, Ph.D., emeritus professor of International Political Economy at INSEAD, addressed the various political contexts in which business takes place around the globe. He noted that, despite all that is currently happening in Europe now, it is still a better environment to do business than either China or Russia.

Dominique Moisi, senior adviser for the French Institute for International Relations, explained the significance of the recent defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy in the presidential election in France to the Socialist Party candidate. Moisi cautioned against reading the election as a referendum on Sarkozy’s economic policies of austerity.

Rather, he said the French presidency entails both the concrete role of a prime minister and the ceremonial role that the Queen of England occupies.

“As prime minister, Nicolas Sarkozy did pretty well. But as queen, he did very badly, and the problem is that in France, the president is at the same time the prime minister and the queen,” he said.

“He desacralized the function of the elected monarch that is the president of France.”

Other speakers included Peter Pace, retired Marines General and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; John Tognino, former vice chairman of NASDAQ and chair of the Fordham Board of Trustees, Sir Robin Knox Johnson, chairman of Clipper Ventures, and Jamil Qureshi and Andrew Greening from Clipper Greening Ventures.

General Pace explored the myriad challenges that cyber crime poses to businesses. In five to ten years, he predicted, small groups of individuals will have the computing capacity to inflict serious damage.

“When I talk to C.E.O.’s, I say, call your C.I.O., and ask him or her, ‘Has your database ever been penetrated?’ If they tell you no, get a new C.I.O, because you have been penetrated.”

Tognino noted that the most important asset any business has its reputation. As a young trader at Merrill Lynch on November 22, 1963, Tognino and colleagues said they immediately put in orders to sell when they found out that President John F. Kennedy had been shot. As a result, they made a windfall in the short period before the markets were shut down at 2 p.m.

This did not sit well with their supervisor, who demanded that they call back all the clients they sold to and cancel the trades. It was a lesson he said he has always taken to heart.

“There is no price on reputation,” he said. “We’re in a global marketplace. You can’t hide. What you do tomorrow in Shanghai, we’ll know immediately in New York, and based on that alone, you’ve got to protect each one of your reputations.”

Chinese journalist and author Helen Yi Chen asked Tognino to organize the group interview at the Lincoln Center campus for a special issue of BQ Beijing Youth Weekly devoted to the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. Chen said her aim was to share the experiences and emotional responses of those who witnessed the events of 9/11 first-hand—accounts that remain unknown to most Chinese readers.

Her article, to be published nationwide in China in August of 2011, will also trace the life journeys that have unfolded for each interviewee since the events of that tragic day.

On September 11, 2001, Tognino was traveling down the West Side Highway on his way to work as the executive vice president of the NASDAQ Stock Market when he saw the first plane crash into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Despite the onrush of emergency vehicles to the financial district, Tognino’s first instinct was to go directly to the NASDAQ building to make sure all the members of his team were safe and accounted for.

This decision put him in the vicinity of the falling towers, leading him to become completely cloaked in soot and having to make his way by foot to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to escape the chaotic scene.

While Tognino said his first response was “one of great anger,” that feeling soon turned into a resolve to do whatever he could to help. He recalled how he and his NASDAQ colleagues immediately reassembled in Trumbull, Conn. where they set up a telephone center to assist broker-dealers from around the country, all of whom had been affected by the events of 9/11 in one way or another.

Lisa Carroll, who is now the associate director for NASDAQ but on 9/11 was the director of special events, recalled arriving at Trumbull to man the phones and asking Tognino, “What’s the script?”  To which he replied, “There’s no script.  You pick up the phone and you ask people, ‘What can we do to help? What do you need?’”

John N. Tognino recalls being completely cloaked in soot as he tried to reach the NASDAQ building on 9/11. Photo by Ryan Brenizer

Also interviewed were Jack Hughes, president & CEO of JP Hughes Consulting LLC; Karen Kaiser, partner, Strategic Initiatives, LLC; James Toes, FCRH ’85 (Economics), president & CEO of the Security Traders Association; Kimberly Unger, Esq., executive director of Security Traders Association of New York, Inc.; and Joan Cavanagh, associate director of Campus Ministry at Fordham University.

The themes of regeneration and hope emerged in the stories recounted by all the interviewees. Taken together, their accounts presented a portrait of camaraderie and compassion amongst those in the Wall Street community in the days and months following the tragedy.

Toes, who worked as a trading manager for Merrill Lynch at the time, described the impact of September 11 on his particular neighborhood, which lost many people who had worked in the financial sector.

Toes said that he continues to see the resilience of the human spirit in watching the growth and development of the children who lost parents on 9/11. “They are an inspiration to us all to keep on going,” he said.

Cavanagh reflected on the great losses suffered by the Fordham community that day, including relatives, friends, colleagues, children, and alumni.

“Ten years later, I still can’t believe that happened,” she said.

Both Cavanagh and Tognino noted the role the University played in beginning the healing process, bringing the Wall Street and Fordham communities together in memorial services soon after the tragedy. Those communities will come together again this September 11 for an event at Fordham to mark the ten-year anniversary.

Chen’s connection to Fordham comes by way of her involvement with the Beijing International MBA program (BiMBA), a consortium of Jesuit business schools at Peking University’s China Center for Economic Research. Through writing about BiMBA, Chen forged a friendship with Tognino, which has led to her current 9/11 project.

In thanking the interviewees for their participation, Chen said that she hoped that the sharing of 9/11 stories would act as a bridge, helping to open a gateway between America and China.

– Nina Romeo

The chairman of the Fordham University Board of Trustees rang the NASDAQ closing bell on Feb. 8, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the world’s largest exchange company.

John Tognino (FCLS ’75) joined several others at the NASDAQ Stock Market in Times Square, including Bob Greifeld, chief executive officer of NASDAQ OMX; Eric Noll, executive vice president of Transaction Services at NASDAQ OMX; T. Timothy Ryan Jr., president and chief executive officer of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA).

Many of the participants helped transform the NASDAQ Stock Market from an over-the-counter market 40 years ago to the largest, most transparent electronic exchange in the world, according to information found on the NASDAQ website.

Tognino spent 36 years at Merrill Lynch & Co., where he held several positions, including managing director for global equities and managing director for international equities.

In 1991, Tognino was appointed executive vice president of global sales and member affairs at NASDAQ.

After retiring from Merrill Lynch in 1993, Tognino served as president and chief executive officer of the Security Traders Association and executive vice president of capital markets and trading at Charles Schwab & Co.

Over the years, Tognino has maintained strong ties to his alma mater, serving as chairman of Fordham’s Board of Directors and the Executive Committee since 2004.

He established the Tognino Family Scholarship, which provides financial support to students in Fordham College of Liberal Studiesand the Gabelli School of Business; and the Tognino Endowment for Disability Services, which supports special-needs students.

The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. is the world’s largest exchange company. It delivers trading, exchange technology and public company services across six continents, with more than 3,600 listed companies.

The group attended the Macy’s fireworks display as the finale of a cultural/academic experience that marked, for some, the first time they left the African continent or set foot on a plane.

“I’ve seen fireworks before,” said Peter Maibelo, a post-graduate student at UP, “but . . .  here in America on July 4, they’re something not to be missed.”

Maibelo and nine other University of Pretoria students arrived in late May to earn certificates in Fordham’s Emerging Markets and Country Risk Analysis Program and to experience American culture via New York.

The men and women, who left July 5, were co-sponsored by the consul general of South Africa. They lived on campus in Tierney Hall and, in their spare time, saw much of what the City had to offer.

“Two shows in five weeks! Broadway was amazing,” said Bridgette Layloo, a post-graduate student of economics at UP. “Back home, we don’t really go to theatre.”

“Living in the Bronx was great,” said Maibelo. “It helped us to see another side of the U.S. than what you see in the movies.”

The students also were invited to informational sessions at the city’s leading financial houses, including J.P. Morgan and Credit Suisse.

But UP economics professor Reyno Seymore, who acted as a chaperone, singled out as the trip’s highlight a June 11 visit to the NASDAQ Times Square trading floor to kick off the 2010 FIFA World Cup, opening in their native South Africa, The students joined South African Consul General Fikile Magubane in ringing the opening bell.

“We missed the opening ceremony in South Africa,” said Bernard Mohlakwana, a UP graduate student in economics, “but we had a different kind of opening ceremony right here.”

Following the NASDAQ opening, the visiting students walked from Times Square to New York’s Paley Center for Media to watch the match.

“We were blowing on our Vuvuzellas and wearing our South African t-shirts,” said Maibelo. “Everybody was staring at us and smiling, and it made up for our not being home.”

A few Fordham students joined the South Africans on their outings. GSAS graduate student Loren James enjoyed the chance to go backstage at Chicago, and to visit Washington D.C., where the group toured the Capitol and visited the United States Agency for International Development.

“I would never be able to do these things on my own, so this program has helped me,” said James, who in August 2009 was among the first Fordham students to attend a summer session at UP. “Being able to share Fordham with them—and especially those places they might not get to see otherwise—has been worthwhile.”

Mohlakwana said he found the coursework in risk analysis particularly relevant to his future plans. Each student had to choose a country to study, and Mohlakwana chose Tanzania, which he analyzed for its strength as an emerging developing market.

“Africa is on the verge of becoming the next big emerging market, and I want to be there and see it through,” he said. “This was my first time off the African continent, and I am taking a lot home with me.”

Oudolapo Fakeye, a GSAS student in economics who took classes with the students, agreed.

“What Fordham is doing is monumental,” he said. “It has offered a course on emerging markets and so many African markets are primed to be very big over the next few decades. South Africa is at the forefront. It shows great promise and has political stability. So an exchange between Fordham and UP students is very significant.”

Seymore said that both Fordham and UP have begun listing each institution’s economics faculty members and their areas of expertise, hoping to match up those professors with similar interests. For Seymore, it was a “thrill” to meet Dominick Salvatore, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Economics and the author of International Economics, the textbook that Seymore routinely uses in his UP classes.

“It’s our hope that UP and Fordham will end up with some joint research, which would be good for both institutions,” said Seymore, a specialist in environmental economics and international trade.

“Fordham has embarked on a mission to have academic centers all around the world, collaborations that will benefit both Fordham and our partner universities,” said Booi Themeli, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics, one of the programs’ faculty members. “Now our first South African students have gotten the full American experience.”

The MSGF program was officially registered with the New York State Education Department in September, and will launch in 2010. The Board of Education’s approval was the final step in a year-long program development effort between Peking University’s National School of Development (NSD) and Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA).

“Thanks to our partnership with the NASDAQ OMX Educational Foundation, Fordham is once again taking a leadership position in business education,” said Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., senior vice president/chief academic officer at Fordham. “International experience, in and outside the classroom, will prepare graduates of the MSGF program to lead in a world of interconnected, 24/7 markets. That the NASDAQ OMX Educational Foundation has seen fit to fund the program so generously ratifies its importance to the finance community.”

(See also “GBA Team Wins Business Research Competition“)

“The NASDAQ OMX Group understands that education is an important part of the ecosystem needed to develop innovative companies that will contribute to the growth of the economy in the U.S. and China,” said Eric Landheer, Head of Asia Pacific for NASDAQ OMX. “The NASDAQ Stock Market currently lists 126 Chinese companies including 33 Chinese companies that listed in 2009 alone,” he added.

The program is designed to prepare professionals for leadership and management roles in the global financial services industry with a set curriculum divided over three trimesters and two countries. The first students will begin coursework in China in the spring of 2010 and continue at Fordham in the summer.

“With the MSGF, Fordham’s Graduate School of Business Administration takes up a task central to the challenge that our national leaders are emphasizing, the task of strengthening cooperative business and economic relations between China and America,” said Robert Himmelberg, Ph.D., interim dean of GBA and co-dean of business faculty. “Our Finance Department has achieved a very high degree of national recognition for its research and teaching capacities and will offer financial training of the highest quality to many of China’s next generation of top business leaders.  It is a mission to which our faculty is fully equal.”

Study will be split between Peking University’s campus in Beijing, China, and Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan. The program will cover several important areas of the financial services industry, including financial management of multi-national companies; risk management; portfolio strategies in equity and fixed income securities; and trading of complex securities in the global financial markets. The curriculum is designed to give students an awareness of the current challenges in the global financial industry, as well as a good foundation in industry theory and applications.

Peking University is China’s first modern research university, and the country’s first national university. The National School of Development was established in 2008 based on the prestigious China Center for Economic Research (CCER). NSD is committed to the internationalization, standardization and localization of the study of the social sciences in China, and to innovation in disciplinary systems, academic perspectives and research methods.

In 2009, 33 Chinese companies listed on the NASDAQ Stock Market, an exchange of NASDAQ OMX, the most of any U.S. exchange during the past year. A total of 126 Chinese companies now list on NASDAQ, including 104 from mainland China and 22 from Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. The NASDAQ Stock Market is the marketplace for 61 percent of U.S. listed education services companies, including three which are headquartered in China. NASDAQ OMX has offices in Beijing and Hong Kong.

The NASDAQ OMX Educational Foundation, Inc., awarded Fordham the $1 million grant in three annual installments of $333,000 to fund the program in cooperation with Peking University. The foundation is supported entirely by contributions from the NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. The foundation’s mission is to support innovative educational programs and charitable activities that further the NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.’s mission to deliver multi-asset, multi-service capability across six continents.

“We look forward to working with NASDAQ on other business education programs,” Freedman said. “We believe the partnership will yield a richer curriculum for our students and a more talented pool of future executives for NASDAQ and the industry in general.”

About Fordham University:
Founded in 1841, Fordham is the Jesuit University of New York, offering exceptional education distinguished by the Jesuit tradition to approximately 14,700 students in its four undergraduate colleges and its six graduate and professional schools. It has residential campuses in the Bronx and Manhattan, a campus in Westchester, the Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk, N.Y., and the London Centre at Heythrop College in the United Kingdom.

About NASDAQ OMX Educational Foundation:
The mission of the NASDAQ OMX Educational Foundation is to promote learning about capital formation, financial markets and entrepreneurship through innovative educational programs. It was established in New York City in 1994 and is supported entirely by contributions from The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc.

About NASDAQ OMX:
The NASDAQ OMX Group, Inc. is the world’s largest exchange company. It delivers trading, exchange technology and public company services across six continents, with approximately 3,700 listed companies.
NASDAQ OMX offers multiple capital raising solutions to companies around the globe, including its U.S. listings market, NASDAQ OMX Nordic, NASDAQ OMX Baltic, NASDAQ OMX First North, and the U.S. 144A sector. The company offers trading across multiple asset classes including equities, derivatives, debt, commodities, structured products and exchange-traded funds. NASDAQ OMX technology supports the operations of over 70 exchanges, clearing organizations and central securities depositories in more than 50 countries. NASDAQ OMX Nordic and NASDAQ OMX Baltic are not legal entities but describe the common offering from NASDAQ OMX exchanges in Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Iceland, Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. For more information about NASDAQ OMX, visit www.nasdaqomx.com. *Please follow NASDAQ OMX on Facebook and Twitter.

GBA Students, Faculty and Administration celebrated the win by closing the bell at NASDAQ on March 1. Photo by Syd Steinhardt

Graduate students Jonathan Ball, Alex Lik Hang Ng, Thomas Messineo and Ravi Misra made up the four-person squad that defeated teams from 15 schools, including Cornell, Yale, Columbia and Rutgers universities. They were assisted by John Hunter, Ph.D., clinical assistant professor of finance and economics, and industry mentor Thomas Galvin.

Fordham will compete against teams from around the world next month at the CFA Institute Global Investment Research Challenge in Hong Kong.

“This is the second time during the eight year annual competition that Fordham’s team has won, an exceptionally high batting average considering that sixteen or more teams compete each year,” said Robert F. Himmelberg, Ph.D., interim dean of GBA. “The team members themselves, their experiences as they prepared for the competition, tell us a good deal about the Fordham’s Graduate School of Business Administration. They are students from diverse national backgrounds and they worked together harmoniously and cooperatively to achieve results and succeeded.  They are quick to acknowledge the value of the tools and methodologies they have received at the hands of the faculty of our Finance Department. That they have developed a strong sense of commitment to excellence as GBA students is evident from the determination they have shown as they have won out over the efforts of a very talented roster of competitors to surpass them.”

Hosted by the NYSSA, the Investment Research Challenge is an educational initiative in which leading industry professionals teach business and finance students how to research and report on a publicly traded company. The contest spans one academic year and consists of the following components:

• training in research and report writing;
• mentoring by a professional research analyst;
• assessment of written reports;
• and presentation of research to a panel of Wall Street experts.

The four finalist teams—Fordham, Cornell, Rutgers and Stony Brook—presented their research to a panel of Wall Street experts on Feb. 25. The Fordham team was chosen as the winner based on the combined scores for the written report and the presentation.

As part of their victory, the Fordham team members had the honor of ringing the closing bell at NASDAQ on March 1.