“Today’s events are designed for recognition, celebration, and appreciation of the numerous contributors to Fordham’s research accomplishments in the past two years,” said George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs.

Hong said that Fordham has received about $16 million in faculty grants over the past nine months, which is an increase of 50.3% compared to the same period last year.

“As a research university, Fordham is committed to excellence in the creation of knowledge and is in constant pursuit of new lines of inquiry,” said Joseph McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said during the virtual celebration. “Our faculty continue to distinguish themselves in this area. Today, today we highlight the truly extraordinary breadth and depth of their work.”

Earning Honors

Ten faculty members, representing two years of winners due to cancellations last year from the COVID-19 pandemic, were recognized with distinguished research awards.

“The distinguished research awards provide us with an opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of our most prolific colleagues, give visibility to the research achievements, and inspire others to follow in their footsteps,” Provost Dennis Jacobs said.

Recipients included Yuko Miki, associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work focuses on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century; David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty; and, in the junior faculty category, Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work examines shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics. (See below for a full list of recipients).

Diving Deeper

Eleven other faculty members presented in their recently published work in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies.

Jews and New York: ‘Virtually Identical’

Images of Jewish people and New York are inextricably tied together, according to Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., professor of history and co-author of Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press, 2017).

“The popular imagination associated Jews with New York—food names like deli and bagels … attitudes and manner, like speed, brusqueness, irony, and sarcasm; with certain industries—the garment industry, banking, or entertainment,” he said. “

Soyer quoted comedian Lenny Bruce, who joked, “the Jewish and New York essences are virtually identical, right?”

Soyer’s book examines the history of Jewish people in New York and their relationship to the city from 1654 to the current day. Other presentations included S. Elizabeth Penry, Ph.D., associate professor of history, on her book The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, on his book Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now (Lexington Books, 2018).

Focus on Cities: The Reality Beyond the Politics

Annika Hinze, Ph.D, associate professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies Program, talked about her most recent work on the 10th and 11th editions of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America (Routledge, 11th edition forthcoming). She focused on how cities were portrayed by the Trump Administration versus what was happening on the ground.

“The realities of cities are really quite different—we’re not really talking about inner cities anymore,” she said. “Cities are, in many ways, mosaics of rich and poor. And yes, there are stark wealth discrepancies, growing pockets of poverty in cities, but there are also enormous oases of wealth in cities.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hinze’s latest edition will show how urban density did not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, as many people thought, but rather it was overcrowding and concentrated poverty in cities that led to accelerated spread..

Other presentations included Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., professor of political science, on his book Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor and chair of the division of psychological and educational services in the Graduate School of Education on her book Career Development Interventions for Social Justice: Addressing Needs Across the Lifespan in Educational, Community, and Employment Contexts (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology on her book America, As Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe (NYU Press, 2018).

A Look into Migration

In her book Migration Crises and the Structure of International Cooperation (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Lockhart, Ph.D. assistant professor of political science, examined how countries often have agreements in place to manage the flow of trade, capital, and communication, but not people. While her work in this book specifically focused on voluntary migration, it also had implications for the impacts on forced migration and the lack of cooperation among nations .

“I actually have really serious concerns about the extent of cooperation … on measures of control, and what that means for the future, when states are better and better at controlling their borders, especially in the developing world,” she said. “And what does that mean for people when there are crises and there needs to be that kind of release valve of movement?”

Other presentations included: Tina Maschi, Ph.D., professor in the Graduate School of Social Service, on her book Forensic Social Work: A Psychosocial Legal Approach to Diverse Criminal Justice Populations and Settings (Springer Publishing Company, 2017), and Tanya Hernández, J.D., professor of law on her book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press, 2018).

Sharing Reflections

The day’s keynote speakers—Daniel Alexander Jones, professor of theatre and 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, head of design and production and assistant professor of design—shared personal reflections on how the year’s events have shaped their lives, particularly their performance and creativity.

For Jones, breathing has always been an essential part of his work after one of his earliest teachers “initiated me into the work of aligning my breath to the cyclone of emotions I felt within.” However, seeing another Black man killed recently, he said, left him unable to “take a deep breath this morning without feeling the knot in my stomach at the killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer in Minnesota.”

Jones said the work of theatre teachers and performers is affected by their lived experiences and it’s up to them to share genuine stories for their audience.

“Our concern, as theater educators, encompasses whether or not in our real-time lived experiences, we are able to enact our wholeness as human beings, whether or not we are able to breathe fully and freely as independent beings in community and as citizens in a broad and complex society,” he said.

Ramos said that he feels his ability to be fully free has been constrained by his own desire to be accepted and understood, and that’s in addition to feeling like an outsider since he immigrated here.

“I actually don’t know who I am if I don’t anchor my self-identity with being an outsider,” he said. “There isn’t a day where I am not hyper-conscious of my existence in a space that contains me. And what that container looks like. These thoughts preface every single process that informs my actions and my decisions in this country.”

Interdisciplinary Future

Both keynote speakers said that their work is often interdisciplinary, bringing other fields into theatre education. Jones said he brings history into his teaching when he makes his students study the origins of words and phrases, and that they incorporate biology when they talk about emotions and rushes of feelings, like adrenaline.

That message of interdisciplinary connections summed up the day, according to Jonathan Crystal, vice provost.

“Another important purpose was really to hear what one another is working on and what they’re doing research on,” he said. “And it’s really great to have a place to come listen to colleagues talk about their research and find out that there are these points of overlap, and hopefully, it will result in some interdisciplinary activity over the next year.”

Distinguished Research Award Recipients

Humanities
2020: Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, whose work included a project sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation on Shaker art, design, and religion.
2021: Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work is on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century.

Interdisciplinary Studies
2020: Yi Ding, Ph.D., professor of school psychology in the Graduate School of Education, who received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a training program for school psychologists and early childhood special education teachers.
2021: Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., professor of Economics and co-director of the Disability Studies Minor, whose recent work includes documenting and understanding economic insecurity and identifying policies that combat it.

Sciences and Mathematics
2020: Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., professor of computer and information sciences and founder director of Fordham Center of Cybersecurity, whose $3 million grant from the National Security Agency will allow Fordham to help Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions build their own cybersecurity programs.
2021: Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair and professor of chemistry, who highlighted his $7.4 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on perovskites.

Social Sciences
2020: Iftekhar Hasan, Ph.D., university professor and E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in International Business and Finance, whose recent work has included the examination of the role of female leadership in mayoral positions and resilience of local societies to crises.
2021: David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty.

Junior Faculty
2020: Asato Ikeda, Ph.D., associate professor of art history, who published The Politics of Painting, Facism, and Japanese Art During WWII.
2021: Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work focuses on shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics.

So when Fordham ceased face-to-face instruction at 1 p.m. on Monday, March 9, due to the threat posed by the COVID-19 outbreak, faculty were faced with the challenge of providing quality instruction that was true to their mission of supporting students and continuing to foster their potential. On March 13, the decision to suspend face-to-face classes was extended through the end of the semester.

As they begin to deliver instruction remotely, faculty have turned to online tools such as Zoom, WebEx, Blackboard, and Google Hangouts to continue students’ education. And they have turned to each other for support, guidance, and tips.

Planning for the transition began in earnest during the last week of February, when Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, and Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, briefed members of the Faculty Senate at its monthly meeting on February 28. Administration officials had been monitoring the spread of the virus in China, and once a case had been reported in Washington state in January, they thought it might spread throughout the United States.

Jacobs said that at that time the University was already making plans to offer online instruction to students who’d been recalled from study abroad programs and who would need instruction while self-quarantining.

“That was the call to action, to say, ‘Let’s begin preparations,’” he said.

“No one would have chosen this as a normal transition path, but these are extraordinary times, and our options were limited,” he said.

“Everyone was committed to serving our students and allowing them to progress towards their academic degrees. It was not just an option to shut down the campus, we had to come up with a continuity plan.”

Technology and Pedagogy

Making the transition required overcoming challenges both technical and pedagogical. Steven D’Agustino, Ph.D., Fordham’s director of online learning, is helping faculty figure out how to best use that technology to deliver their coursework. He’s offered videos and documentation on the University’s Official Online Learning Page and his blog, Learning at a Distance.

D’Agustino said he was impressed at how seriously faculty have put students’ well-being and peace of mind first and foremost. Many are using this week, which happens to be spring break, to explain to their students how they plan to move forward with the rest of the semester and taking steps like telling them exactly what times of the day they’ll be checking their emails. Faculty are establishing virtual office hours when they’ll be available for in-person consultation, and giving serious thought to whether future classes should be held synchronously, when everyone meets together, or asynchronously, which enables students to access material on their own schedules.

D’Agustino encouraged faculty to evaluate their methods as they go, and to draw on the experiences of peers across the country who face the same situation.

“I would say reflective practice is really valuable. This about what you’re doing, and reflect upon it after you’ve done it, and try to include your students and your colleagues in those reflective spaces. Because I think there are a lot of good ideas and support out there, and we’re not alone.”

A Quick Turnaround

Eve Keller, Ph.D., professor of English and president of the Faculty Senate, said she was astonished at how quickly faculty, who teach nearly 2,000 courses a semester, were able to work together to make the transition.

“Faculty had 36 hours to convert their classes online. Some people have done this, and some people had never heard of Zoom, but from what I’ve seen, it’s been an unequivocally congenial, collegial effort to make it happen,” she said.

The transition has not been without occasional hiccups. Anne Fernald, Ph.D., a professor of English and special adviser to the provost for faculty development, emailed fellow arts and science faculty for thoughts on pedagogy on March 11, and after receiving 20 replies, she felt prepared.

Still, when she attempted to teach her first class on Thursday with WebX, she didn’t realize the program’s default volume setting for the program is mute. She ended up recording a podcast for it with the information she planned to share, and is confident she’ll be able to make it work next week, when spring break ends and classes resume.

“I felt like the University did everything it could in this emergency to support us. And I think that the decision to be closed on Tuesday and give people time to prepare was huge. I had colleagues all around the country who didn’t have anything like that. Fordham did it in a way that was as compassionate as it could be,” she said.

Striking the Right Balance

On March 12, Mark Conrad, an associate professor of law and ethics at the Gabelli School of Business, taught three courses—Legal Framework of Business, Sports Law, and Law and the Arts—using the Zoom platform, and was happy with how it came together.

“I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how easy and accessible it has been. I had a number of questions from students. I wasn’t just talking to a computer,” he said, noting the ease in which he was able to share power point slides with students.

“We’re seeing future possibilities. It deals with something I’ve been thinking about which is, let’s say the professor is ill or has a sprained ankle. One could do classes like this, and it could actually minimize absences.”

Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., a professor of political science, taught two classes on March 11 using WebX seminar after department chair Robert Hume, Ph.D., arranged practice sessions for the department. While they went off without a hitch, he said it was hard to read the mood of a room, as many nonverbal communication cues were lost in translation.

“When you teach online, you can’t see feet shifting, or if they have another browser open where they’re checking email. Their parents could be in the room, there could be a car going by. It’s not a controlled environment in which students are only there for the experience,” he said.

“I think I’m going to get better over time at being able to call on people, and I think I’m going to get better at organizing my slide show to make it more entertaining,” he said. But he acknowledged that face-to-face learning will always be preferable.

Edward Cahill, Ph.D., a professor of English, had never used Google Hangouts before and turned to it to teach Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Milton’s Paradise Lost. He found it to be similar to the normal classroom experience, although he said he plans to try different approaches to keep things interesting when the semester resumes, including splitting the class into both synchronous and asynchronous sessions.

Cahill’s new familiarity with online learning comes not only from his work as a professor, but also a student. His experience as a student in an entry-level Spanish class taught by Guillermo Severiche has given him hope that success is possible in the online realm, he said. Severiche, an instructor in the department of modern languages, moved their class to Zoom as well.

“We share documents, we used the e-textbooks. He managed the whole thing flawlessly. So that inspired me to think maybe I can do more.”

Cahill noted that he’s trying to be mindful of the challenges inherent in asking students to complete studies in the midst of a worldwide pandemic.

“There are so many balances to strike between rigor and flexibility, generosity and intensity. I don’t know that anyone has figured it out, and I guess as long as we can stay alert to all of those tensions, we’ll probably find our way through it,” he said.

Doing Lab Work Without the Lab

In some fields, resuming instruction is trickier than just establishing online connections. Stefanie Bubnis, interim managing director of the Fordham Theatre Program, said that while mainstage productions have halted, faculty have bolstered instruction on Google Hangouts and Zoom with old fashioned phone calls and FaceTime.

Professors such as Ann Hamilton, an adjunct professor of theater, are learning on the fly as well. For her first online Acting for the Camera class, she asked students to upload the scenes they recorded of themselves to Hightail and Google Drive. She watched the videos during the designated class time and wrote feedback in a group email to the 17 students in the class. Ultimately it proved to be too time-consuming.

“For my next class I intend to use Zoom, so we are all conferencing together, but they will have sent me the recorded auditions first, so I can have them up on my desktop and we can all watch them together at the same time and actively participate in the feedback. I think the students felt as if they learned a lot today, so that’s a win, given the circumstances,” she said.

Stephen Holler, Ph.D., an associate professor of physics, was able to move the lecture for his General Physics 2 class exclusively to Blackboard, but that wasn’t an option for Experimental Techniques for Physics, a course where teams of students had been working on a single project all semester.

“Some of the work, they’re in the machine shop, they’re doing 3D printing, they’re doing electronics,” he said, noting that this work will have to be completed in a different way than planned.

“Since they’ve done half the project, and they’ve already written up progress reports, I’ll have them turn those progress reports into a paper. Normally I’d also have them do a presentation on a research project they’re interested in; instead I’ll have them write a short paper on that and we’ll do Zoom presentations.

A Big Shift for Information Technology

For Fordham IT, the switch required an unusually speedy response.

Alan Cafferkey, director of faculty technology services, noted that his team—which includes experienced technicians, a fine arts and digital humanities professional, instructional designers, a former math teacher, a librarian, adjunct professors, a media and accessibility expert, and an Ed.D. candidate—normally prefers to work with six months lead time to develop an online course.

“This, however, was everyone already two months into the semester with only a couple of weeks of realizing that something might happen, prepping, and then a sudden shift, with hundreds of people making the change,” he said.

He was especially proud that his team was so on top of responding to the multitude of individual faculty requests. In addition, in collaboration with the provost’s office, they created a Course Continuity site before the University shifted to online learning—as preparation for what might happen.

When the switch was made, IT as a whole simultaneously shifted its entire operation to function remotely—including the IT Customer Care help desk—while helping other offices do the same.

IT also rolled out an entirely new enterprise-wide system in Zoom, reinforced numerous systems, and conducted a multitude of workshops on topics such as teaching synchronously and asynchronously, setting up remote offices, and best practices for many popular web tools. Additional workshops will continue through the spring and can be found on the department’s blog.

Going forward, Cafferkey said the department will continue to field faculty questions and requests, work closely with vendors such as Blackboard, and support other University initiatives as needed. He credited the efforts of colleagues across IT, the provost’s office, the IT departments in the Gabelli School of Business and Fordham Law, the online learning teams at the Graduate School of Social Service and the Graduate School of Education, and the staff at Fordham’s library.

“I’ve been really touched at how kind most of the faculty have been about the support provided. I’ve gotten so many thoughtful notes and comments, it’s been really heart-warming. It’s helped that there are so many offices working collaboratively,” he said.

Looking at the Big Picture

Lisa Holsberg, a Ph.D. candidate in theology, found herself transitioning Great Christian Hymns, which she is teaching for the School of Continuing and Professional Studies (PCS), entirely online. But she was in some ways already prepared to do so, as she is also currently teaching an online course, Christian Mystical Texts, for PCS. She was already accustomed to using Blackboard extensively, as well as Screencast-O-Matic and Voicethread, which lets students listen to each other talk, in their own words, about a specific problem. But ultimately, technology is just one little piece of the story, she said.

“It’s really, what is your commitment to students and to learning and going forward in the midst of change? How do you rethink what it means to teach, what it means to learn in conditions you’re not used to? You have to really dig deep into what your fundamental commitments are to your teaching, your students, to yourself, to your topic, and then just use whatever tools you have in order to meet those goals,” she said.

The Path Forward

Going forward, D’Agustino said he thinks faculty will settle into a hybrid approach for the rest of the semester, making tweaks as they get feedback from students.

“They may say, ‘We’re going to do a synchronous session, so here are the slides in advance, here is the reading material, here’s the study guide, there are some questions you should be able to answer during the session,’” he said.

“So even if a student can’t attend or log in, they still have the notes, the readings, the study guides, and they can say, ‘Professor I couldn’t log in; its 4 a.m. for me. But here are the answers to those questions. And the faculty member can, if it’s part of their protocol, share those answers with the class so that student is part of it.”

Jacobs said that he’s hopeful that faculty will rise to the challenge in what is an extraordinary time of upheaval. He noted that online instruction will always have a place in graduate level and professional-oriented instruction, especially for students who are working or have family obligations. As such, the University will continue to evaluate it on a case-by-case basis. But face-to-face teaching and learning is at the heart of Fordham’s mission, he said.

“Jesuit education is really one of formation in context of community. We treasure that at Fordham, and we always will. It’s the reason why during the academic year, we have not, by intention, moved our undergraduate academic offerings into an online format. We’ve offered them face-to-face, and will return to that when it safe to do, when the virus has passed,” he said.

These knotty questions haven’t been resolved in 2019. But on February 18, 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. engaged with them in a televised debate that continues to reverberate today.

On Monday, Nov. 25, Nicholas Buccola, Ph.D., the author of The Fire Is upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate over Race in America (Princeton University Press, 2019), will visit Fordham to discuss that debate, which was held in a packed auditorium in Cambridge, England.

Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., professor of political science, said the topic of the 1965 debate, “The American Dream is at the Expense of the American Negro,” spoke to issues that are still with us today.

“William F. Buckley Jr.’s position was, the American dream is now available to African Americans. They should take advantage of opportunities that are possible in America. They should try to succeed in business, they should try to succeed in politics, they should have families, and address common threats to the United States, like communism,” he said.

“James Baldwin thought racism pervades every aspect of American life, and you need to actively study it and understand why. You can’t just imagine this as a fair starting point for African Americans to participate in the American dream.”

Tampio noted that one of the most famous lines that Baldwin uttered during the debate,

“I picked the cotton, and I carried it to market, and I built the railroads, under someone else’s whip, for nothing. For nothing,” was a precursor for articles such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 The Case for Reparations.

At the time, Buckley was using the National Review, which he’d started 10 years earlier, to lay out the case for what he considered a thoughtful, intellectual conservative movement. In his book, Buccola, a professor of political science at Linfield College, explores the deeper philosophical issues that underpinned Buckley’s arguments, Tampio said. The challenge Buckley set forth for himself was taking positions that inherently protected white nationalism, such as states rights, while also disavowing the explicit racism of the Klu Klux Klan.

“Part of what Buckley was really trying to argue was, there are principled cases for letting people desegregate, or address racial injustice in due course. Buckley was nervous about government reparations programs, and big government trying to solve the problem of racism,” Tampio said.

“Baldwin was saying ‘No, we’ve got to do a lot more than this.’ He wasn’t interested in public policy himself, but there was this sense that the government needed to do something. Part of what makes the debate so interesting is, they both have good points.”

Tampio said he hopes that bringing Buccola to campus will spur the Fordham community to look inward.

“What can we do to make African-American students feel comfortable on campus and to make people from the Bronx feel comfortable on campus? How can we do our part to break down barriers between people?” he said.

“What Buccola’s book does is it gives us a chance to think from a new angle about this problem we’re still dealing with. How much do we let things just take their course to address racism, and how much do we need conscious accounting, moral reformation, and public policy to change minds and hearts?”

Nicholas Buccola’s visit is sponsored by Fordham’s Department of Political Science and the Delta Zeta chapter of Pi Sigma Alpha. It will take place Monday, Nov. 25, from 4 to 6 p.m. at Faculty Memorial Hall, Room 320.

Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Johns Hopkins, 2018) crafts a nuanced case against standardization that rests on two threads: that the Common Core is ineffective, and that it is undemocratic. Tampio illustrates that the strict requirements of Common Core pedagogy inhibit creative thinking and intellectual curiosity, traits that are essential for long-term success in the contemporary information economy. The Common Core “does not teach young people how to think; it teaches young people how to follow orders,” said Tampio in an interview.

He bases the second leg of his argument on a reading of seminal thinkers such as James Madison and Alexis de Tocqueville, who argued that instituting top-down educational policy over a pluralistic and diverse society was profoundly undemocratic. The result, they foresaw, would be a damaging collective disillusionment with the very idea of civic involvement.

In his introduction, Tampio writes that the Common Core initially sounded to him “like what the tailors told the emperor when selling him his new robe.” He notes that the book has already begun provoking reactions and conversations since its publication on March 1. Common Core received a Wall Street Journal review by Naomi Schaefer Riley, who called the book “concise and readable.”

Perhaps more important, Tampio reports having received dozens of messages from parents who have been following the rise of Common Core with alarm, and who have expressed support for his rebuttals of the initiative.

Such cross-partisan appeal stems from the book’s stimulating mixture of political perspectives to shape its polemic. On the one hand, Tampio criticizes the Common Core as rigid and intellectually demeaning, objections that one might generally expect to hear from the left. “Local education authorities,” Tampio writes, “should have the option to adopt a progressive education model that encourages self-directed learning in a supportive community.”

On the other, Tampio says that such decisions should devolve to state and local control—a typical conservative stance—going so far as to say that the issues of gender identity and sexual education should not be defined by external ideological forces. The public, Tampio said, “still tends to think of federal involvement in the education wars as if it were still 1954”—an allusion to Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation of public schools.

Today’s policy landscape, as Tampio’s book reveals, is even more complicated.

—Michael Lindgren

But what parallels can we draw from the landmark text in a global society?

Through a series of lectures from Dec. 10 to Dec. 15 at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science, examined Deleuze and Guattari’s pioneering theories through such a political lens.

Tampio, who specializes in the history of political thought, contemporary political theory, and education policy, spoke of Deleuze’s political vision and how it sheds light on think tanks and intercivilizational dialogue.

Xia Ying, a philosophy professor at Tsinghua, invited Tampio to speak at the leading research university founded more than 100 years ago. Stephen Freedman, provost of Fordham University, said many Fordham faculty have scholarly activities with key universities in China—which is an important priority for Fordham.

“For each lecture, I talked for about an hour, and then everyone asked for clarifications or shared their thoughts, for instance, on how to diagram Chinese political thought,” said Tampio, author of Deleuze’s Political Vision (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).

Among Deleuze’s most thought-provoking concepts was his model of the rhizome. Based on the botanical rhizome or “mass of roots” which spreads from a tree, the theory is akin to political multiplicity.

“On one hand, the goal of the lectures was to share my knowledge about Deleuze, but on the other hand, I wanted to discuss the relevance of Deleuze’s ideas in the Chinese context,” said Tampio.

Though China follows capitalistic economic principles and operates as a one-party system, Tampio said he wanted to foster discussions about Deleuze’s philosophical approach amid China’s evolving role in international politics and business.

“It was exciting to see the audience in China thinking about the ideas of the rhizome, and what it would mean to have a multi-polar world where there is no tree trunk of centralized power but where countries have to interact to address shared concerns,” he said.

Tampio, who had never been to China before, said Chinese citizens tend to be more sympathetic to the notion of centralized authority because of their own political system.

“In the West, we have a vibrant public sphere and civil society where people are free to disagree with the government,” he said. “But nearly everyone I met in China spoke English and was interested in talking. China does not have the same tradition of free speech; at the same time, the Chinese I met were curious and open to learning and sharing ideas.”

In the process of sharing knowledge about Deleuzian liberalism, pluralism, and comparative political theory, Tampio said he returned to America with new perspectives.

“China is an economic powerhouse that wants to play a larger role on the world stage, economically and politically,” he said. “We have to take China and Chinese political thought seriously.”

Speaking at Fordham Law School as part of the Education Law Collaborative’s first education law conference, Tampio made the case that, despite ESSA provisions that allow states to opt out of Common Core, as a practical matter it is no different.

“ESSA requires states to remain within the standards, testing, and accountability paradigm . . . if they want Title I funds.”
That means that if a state wants to follow a more original model of educating, such as the John Dewey model, they forfeit federal funding. “John Dewey said standardized tests can only be useful to help us figure out how to help a particular child, but they shouldn’t be used to rank children, because children have all sorts of special gifts, talents, and interests.”

In his talk, “ESSA and the Myth of Return to Local Control,” Tampio traced the evolution of education reform in the United States, including the programs Nation at Risk (1983), Improving America’s Schools Act (1994), No Child Left Behind (2001), and Race to the Top (2009). ESSA, which was signed by President Obama in 2015, ostensibly reversed the trend toward federalizing education, but Tampio said it has not been effective.

That’s important, he said, because. A top-down approach squelches local control, and students should feel like their voices and opinions are valuable.

“Part of a democratic education is to get kids to learn about the world, and feel empowered that they have a voice in it,” he said.

Local control also benefits low income and minority communities, he said. He cited examples from Kitty Kelly Epstein’s A Different View of Urban Schools: Civil Rights, Critical Race Theory, and Unexplored Realities (Counterpoints, 2012).

“All the research confirms that when parents are involved, students do better. And yet, if they don’t have a voice other than what color cupcakes to bring to the PTA, they’re not going to be active in [local]school boards,” he said.

In New York, the Department of Education has renamed Common Core the “Next Generation Learning Standards,” but on issues of standards and accountability, Tampio said, they’re largely the same. Seventy-sevent percent of the existing Common Core standards will have no change whatsoever, and “clarifications” have been issued for just 15.9 percent of them. In order to receive $1.6 billion in federal funds, the state must comply with the changes and submit them to the federal government next month.

ESSA states that there is “no requirement, direction, or mandate to adopt Common Core standards,” but Tampio says that does not help states rid themselves of Common Core standards already in place. ESSA’s language on standards requires states to maintain “challenging academic content standards.”

“When ESSA was signed in 2015, most states already adopted Common Core. The question [should be]what is the federal government going to do to help facilitate states trying to exit the Common Core?” he said.

“[It] is an incredible burden for any state to choose an alternative, and I don’t think we’re going to see any.

“I’d be delighted if they did, because it would be a road map for every other state on how to do it,” he said.

Tampio, an education activist, claims that Common Core standards, with its test-based model, do little to develop creativity and independent thinking in developing children.

Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., an associate professor of political science, is  currently writing a book on democracy and national education standards. Education is more than just a research interest though; as the father of children in elementary school, Tampio gets to see up close the changing face of American education. In a recent OpEd in the Journal News, “Corporate Science Standards Not Best for Schools,” Tampio expressed deep skepticism of New York State’s newly approved P-12 Science Learning Standards, noting that they’re similar to Common Core standards.

To understand why that similarity is bad, we chatted with Tampio about what Common Core gets wrong, and sometimes right, in the classroom.

Full transcript below:

Patrick Verel: How would you describe Common Core for the folks who aren’t already familiar with it and why is it, in your view, bad for education?

Nicholas Tampio: So the Common Core dates standards in math and English language arts. Say that by the end of third grade students should be able to do this when they write or read, or they should be able to do this when they do arithmetic. But, what that means in practice is that schools are cutting out all sorts of things that aren’t math or English so my child is barely going on field trips. He hasn’t had any hands on science or very little. He’s not learning about American History. And so I would say one of the reasons that a lot of parents and educators are very upset about the common core is that it narrows the curriculum in a way that parents or private school would never accept.

Patrick Verel: If New York schools continue to embrace Common Core standards it stands to reason that in time students who have been raised on them will eventually show up in your classroom at Fordham. What challenges do you foresee that presenting?

Nicholas Tampio: The math standards, the way that they progress it becomes very hard for children to major in calculus in high school. If students don’t take calculus in high school it’s going to be very hard from them to major in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics discipline when they get to college. Regarding the English standards, one of the practices of the Common Core is to give students short informational text and have them answer questions about that informational text, and so the Common Core provides students very little opportunity to do self directed, self initiated research projects.

My students have all come up under no student left behind and now they’re starting to come through with the Common Core. When I assigned them a 10 page research at the beginning of the school year as freshmen, they have never written anything that long before. They look at me in shock.

Patrick Verel: Are there any aspects of Common Core that you actually like?

Nicholas Tampio: There are a lot of good aspects to the Common Core that are sort of contaminated because they’re baked together with the bad aspects. So, for example one of the anchor standards, and these are the basic parts of the English language arts standards is that students should be able to determine or clarify the meaning of unknown in multiple meaning words and phrases by using context clues. That’s a good skill. The bad part is, is that students are not allowed to write bringing in outside material to explain what words mean, right? They have to interpret the Gettysburg Address without talking about the Civil War, and so I think that’s where the problem results and the Common Core does not prepare students to recognize fake news.

When they go through their K through 12 education they have to do close reading of text and they aren’t allowed to criticize the text or say that the text are providing false information so there is this concern that it is not training readers to be careful about sources.

I became interested in this topic because I have young children and I am watching what the Common Core and the next generation science standards are doing and can do to their education. I am talking with parents all around the country who see similar things and part of what we’re trying to do is alert people that listen, don’t just go to the Common Core webpage. Don’t just go to the next generation science standards webpage to figure out what it is, talk to people in the classroom who sees what it means in practice and then maybe we should all rethink whether it’s a good investment of time and money.

Tampio, an associate professor of political science, is the author of the new book Deleuze’s Political Vision (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015). Described by reviewers as a “remarkable book” and “tour de force,” Tampio’s book tackles the elaborate political theory of 20th-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

In 1980, Deleuze and French psychiatrist Félix Guattari published their masterpiece, A Thousand Plateaus, which is at the center of Tampio’s study. The 645-page tome covers numerous topics, including ontology, linguistics, biology, literature, music, religion, ethics, and politics, and continues to reverberate throughout postmodern philosophy.

“It took me over seven years to take notes on the entire book,” said Tampio, who specializes in the Enlightenment’s impact on contemporary politics and philosophy.

“The book is challenging on many levels… [It] seems chaotic and hermetic, but it is an intricately designed system.”

Tampio’s book is one of the first to attempt a comprehensive interpretation of A Thousand Plateaus. In it, Tampio examines definitions and concepts that Deleuze and Guattari invent and pieces together a complete political picture. For example, he explains how the phrase “concrete assemblages” in Deleuze’s chapter on geology lays the foundation for his thinking on the stratified nature of political parties.

The book’s linguistic mining, together with a comparison of Deleuze and Guattari to other prominent political theorists, refutes the popular notion among philosophers that Deleuze tried to revive Marxism, Tampio says. In fact, Deleuze identified with a liberal democratic tradition that “protects idiosyncratic ways of life.”

What Deleuze ultimately encourages, Tampio argues, is to re-envision politics as a sort of “garden” of ideas.

“Many philosophers think of politics as a tree, where people disagree on details, the level of the branches, but agree on fundamentals—the trunk,” Tampio said. “A Thousand Plateaus invites us to view politics as a garden without any one person, group, country, or ideology serving as the authoritative center.

“[Through this concept], we can consider how Deleuzian tulips may reach out to Muslim lotuses to address common concerns in the global garden.”

The launch event attracted Ira Katznelson, Ruggles professor of political science and history at Columbia University, and Giovanna Borradori, professor of philosophy at Vassar College, who joined Tampio to discuss the future of the Enlightenment. In Kantian Courage, Tampio contends that political progressives should embody a critical and creative disposition to invent new political theories to address the problems of the present age.

Students from Tampio’s Manresa course (The Enlightenment and its Critics) attended, as did faculty and graduate students from the Fordham political science and philosophy departments.

From left to right, Ira Katznelson, Nick Tampio, and Giovanna Borradori.

Just as Copernicus revolutionized astronomy by putting the sun at the center of our solar system, Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy placed man at the center of conceptual and empirical experience.

Kant’s revolutionary perspective, says Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., inspired the creation of post-Enlightenment secular governments, following dark centuries of religious acrimony between Christian factions.

And while many existing secular governments grew from that Christian-dominated Enlightenment, the assistant professor of political science argues that, today, political theorists need to face a new reality.

“In our country and around the world, we have interactions between Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Confucians, Jews, Mormons, and atheists,” said Tampio.

“How do we facilitate healthy political-religious pluralism in this new historical situation?”

Is it time, Tampio wonders, for another Enlightenment?

In his forthcoming book from Fordham University Press:Kantian Courage: Advancing the Enlightenment in Contemporary Political Theory, Tampio suggests that political progressives from both Western and Islamic traditions could benefit from adopting an innovative mindset.

Doing so, he maintains, could help diverse faiths forge coalitions about matters of common concern, including terrorism, the environment, and a just distribution of global resources.

“There is a powerful argument in Islamic political thought that holds that the Quran and the Prophetic tradition provide sufficient guidance for politics,” said Tampio. “Anything else is bid‘a, or blameworthy innovation.

“The difficulty is that the Quran and the Prophetic tradition do not mention democracy, human rights, or liberty—all concepts that originate from ancient Greece. Thus Islamists oppose many Western political ideologies.

“We need to invent new political theories to address the problems of the age—rather than hold to outdated political concepts and frameworks.”

Tampio’s perspective has found an ally in the work of Tariq Ramadan, Ph.D., a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University who has called for a Muslim intellectual revolution along the lines of Kant’s Copernican revolution.

What makes Ramadan so interesting, said Tampio, is that he thinks across the Islamic sciences and Western philosophy. Ramadan situates himself in an Arab cultural renaissance movement that encourages ijtihad—the creative exercise of reason when the scriptural sources are silent. Muslims, Ramadan has said, can learn from and contribute to European and American political thought.

“Ramadan employs ijtihad to argue that Western Muslims may find ways to reconcile their Western political commitments and Muslim identity. One such concept he invents is the space of testimony,dar al-shahada, a place where multiple faiths, including Islam, have the right to flourish.

“He is reviving an Islamic intellectual tradition that prizes intercivilizational dialogue and critical thinking,” said Tampio.

Not surprisingly, Ramadan and his ideas are controversial on both sides of the Atlantic. Because he has criticized the human rights records of Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria, he has been banned from each of these countries, said Tampio.

Yet many Westerners suspect Ramadan is sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded by his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna. (In fact, the Department of State prohibited Ramadan from visiting the United States between 2004 and 2010.)

“Ramadan has the potential to open minds and spark conversations in multiple communities,” said Tampio.

Where Egypt and other transitioning Muslim-majority countries are going politically is hard to predict, Tampio said. Like Ramadan, he hopes that the Arab Awakening leads to the creation of strong civil societies where people of different faiths may exchange ideas—an intellectual revolution alongside a political one.

“A problem with political revolutions is that they change leaders, but the way of thinking persists,” he said. “Ramadan presents a way for Muslims to engage other faiths with respect and curiosity—a process that those in the Kantian tradition ought to reciprocate.”

Growing up outside of Washington D.C., Tampio has long been interested in progressive politics, and participated in C-SPAN youth forums. Eventually he earned his doctorate at Johns Hopkins University.

He hopes his book targets Kant scholars, Enlightenment historians, and anyone interested in Islam and the West.

“I am intrigued by the idea that politics could be modeled on a garden rather than a tree. For tree politics, constituencies may differ as long as they share an ideological trunk.

“For garden politics, multiple existential faiths cooperate to sustain a vibrant community.”