Since the 1970s, Fordham students have been studying and contributing to the spirit of innovation and community renewal that has come to define what it means to be a Bronxite.

Fifty years ago, a new art form burst forth on the streets of the Bronx, born from rich musical traditions and a spirit of innovation in neighborhoods of color ravaged by deindustrialization and written off by most of the country. In the ensuing decades, the Fordham community has not only studied and celebrated hip-hop as a revolutionary cultural force but also helped preserve its Bronx legacy—through efforts to recognize the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as the genre’s birthplace, and through oral-history interviews with some of hip-hop’s seminal figures.

“I think the lesson is, let’s explore, interrogate, and embrace the cultural creativity of our surrounding areas because it’s unparalleled,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African and African American studies and founding director of Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project.

Naison teaches a popular class, From Rock and Roll to Hip-Hop, that draws on artists like Cardi B, Nas, and Run-DMC to understand the music and its part in U.S. history—and to explore issues he’s spent his career teaching. “I’m not a hip-hop scholar,” he said. “Rather, I’m someone who works to have community voices heard.”

And just as the music has evolved over the past 50 years, so have efforts to revitalize the borough and tell the stories of its residents.

Challenging ‘Deeply Entrenched Stereotypes’

Amplifying community voices is at the heart of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Fordham launched the project in 2002, at the request of the Bronx County Historical Society, to document and preserve the history of Black people in New York City’s northernmost borough. Naison and his team of Fordham students, faculty, and community historians have spoken with hip-hop pioneers like Pete DJ Jones and Kurtis Blow, but the project is much broader: The archive contains verbatim transcripts of interviews with educators, politicians, social workers, businesspeople, clergy members, athletes, and leaders of community-based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the 1930s. The archive, which also includes scholarly essays about the Bronx, was digitized in 2015, making the interviews fully accessible to the public.

“Starting by interviewing a small number of people I already knew,” Naison wrote in Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s (Fordham University Press, 2016), “I stumbled upon a large, passionate, and knowledgeable group of people who had been waiting for years to tell stories of communities long forgotten, communities whose very history challenged deeply entrenched stereotypes about Black and Latino settlement of the Bronx.”

For Naison, the project highlights how the borough, defying the odds, rebuilt neighborhoods following the arson of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. The neighborhoods, with lower crime rates, saw community life flourish again, and in recent decades, the Bronx became a location of choice for new immigrants to New York. BAAHP research includes interviews with Bronxites from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, among other nations. It gives voice to growing, diverse immigrant communities that have enlivened Bronx neighborhoods where Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican people lived before them. “The Bronx is this site where people mix their cultures and they create something new,” Naison said. “It makes this a lot of fun to study.”

Shaping Global Perceptions

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, helped facilitate at least 50 BAAHP interviews from 2004 to 2010, when he was the project’s research director. He said the archive is useful for anyone studying how cities have changed over the decades.

“I hope people use it to think differently about the Bronx, to include the Bronx more deeply and broadly in urban studies in the United States,” said Purnell, now an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Bowdoin College, where he uses the Fordham archive in his own research and in the classroom with his students. “I hope that it also expands how we think about Black people in New York City and in American cities in general from the mid-20th century onward.”

Since 2015, when the BAAHP archives were made available online, the digital recordings have been accessed by thousands of scholars around the world, from Nairobi to Singapore, Paris to Berlin. Peter Schultz Jørgensen, an urbanist and author in Denmark, has been using information from the digital archive to complete a book titled Our Bronx!

“Portraying and documenting everyday life in the Bronx, as it once was, is essential in protecting the people of the Bronx from misrepresentation, while at the same time providing valuable knowledge that can help shape their future,” he said. “Just as BAAHP gathers the web of memory, my book is about the struggles that people and community organizations have waged and are waging in the Bronx. And more important, and encouraging, it talks about how they are now scaling up via the Bronxwide Coalition and their Bronxwide plan for more economic and democratic control of the borough.”

Championing Bronx Renewal

The movement Jørgensen describes is one in which members of the Fordham community have long played key roles, according to historian and journalist Jill Jonnes, author of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. In the mid-1980s, when she published the first edition of the book, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment and arson that had ravaged the borough.

“Today, we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying these neighborhoods,” Jonnes wrote in a preface to the third edition of South Bronx Rising, published last year by Fordham University Press. “Even as fires relentlessly spread across the borough—as landlords extracted what they could from their properties regardless of the human cost—local activists and the social justice Catholics were mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.”

One of those Catholics was Paul Brant, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic (and later priest) who arrived at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the late 1960s to teach and to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. At the time, faith in the viability of cities was at a low point. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, and two decades of studied underinvestment had taken their predictable toll. The Bronx was experiencing the worst of it, and the people who lived in its neighborhoods were demonized as the cause of the problems.

Brant, who died in May 2023 at the age of 82, wanted to understand what could be done. He earned a spot in New York City’s prestigious Urban Fellows program, meant to harness ideas for a city in crisis. Gregarious and forceful, yet able to work diplomatically, he had the backing of Fordham’s president at the time, James Finlay, S.J., to serve as the University’s liaison to the Bronx. With other young Jesuits, he lived in an apartment south of campus, on 187th Street and Marion Avenue, gaining firsthand insight into the scope of neglect and abandonment afflicting the borough.

“Paul felt, well, look, there’s a lot of people still in these neighborhoods. It’s not inevitable that everything gets worse,” said Roger Hayes, GSAS ’95, one of Brant’s former Jesuit seminary classmates. “What are we going to do?”

Long conversations with Hayes and Jim Mitchell, another seminary friend, convinced Brant that solutions to the Bronx’s problems would come by directing the power of the people themselves. In 1972, they formed a neighborhood association in nearby Morris Heights. They used relationships within the parish to confront negligent landlords. Seeing nascent successes there, they moved to launch a larger group.

In 1974, Brant convinced pastors from 10 Catholic parishes to sponsor an organization to fight for the community, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCC) was born. The group expanded to include Protestant and Jewish clergy—membership was always nonsectarian—and went on to train leaders in hundreds of tenant associations and neighborhood groups, including the University Neighborhood Housing Program, which Fordham helped to establish in the early 1980s to create, preserve, and improve affordable housing in the Bronx, and which has been led for many years by Fordham graduate Jim Buckley, FCRH ’76.

All of these groups were knit together across racial lines and around share interests during the worst years of abandonment and destruction. When they learned that rotten apartments had roots beyond individual slumlords, they picketed banks for redlining, the practice of withholding loans to people in neighborhoods considered a poor economic risk. Before long, Bronx homemakers and blue-collar workers were boarding buses to City Hall, demanding meetings with commissioners and testifying at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

With similar people-power organizations nationwide, they won changes in the nation’s banking laws through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, drove reinvestment to cities, and sprouted a new ecosystem of nonprofit affordable housing.

Preserving Hip-Hop’s Bronx Birthplace

It’s the stuff of legend now: On August 11, 1973, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a 100-plus-unit apartment building just blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

Fast forward to 2008, when 1520 Sedgwick was laden with debt acquired by Wall Street investors who were failing to maintain the building. Organizers from the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, a group focused on preserving affordable housing, hoped that documenting 1520’s history would help save it. They asked Fordham professor Mark Naison, Ph.D., to help. His research—which led to a lecture on C-SPAN and was highlighted in an August 2008 appearance on the PBS show History Detectives—helped convince the city government to intervene, eventually preserving the building as a decent and affordable place to live. In 2021, its standing became official: The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution acknowledging 1520 Sedgwick as the birthplace of hip-hop.

Learning About Bronx Renewal

Each year, Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning shares this view of Bronx (and Fordham) history with incoming students, particularly those who participate in its Urban Plunge program in late August. The pre-orientation program gives new students the chance to explore the city’s neighborhoods and join local efforts to foster community development.

“For 30 years, the Plunge experience has offered our students their first introduction to institutions like Part of the Solution and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, organizations founded by Fordham community members in collaboration with local residents that have built community, advocated for justice, and provided services and resources for the whole person,” said Julie Gafney, Ph.D., Fordham’s assistant vice president for strategic mission initiatives and executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Students learn directly from local residents and policy experts about how they can shape policy decisions and build a better future for Fordham and its neighbors. “We really want to introduce first-year students, along with their upper-class mentors, to what’s driving community work in the Bronx right now,” Gafney said. “It’s an ideal ground for fostering a four-year commitment to community solution-building here in the Bronx.”

Reimagining the Cross Bronx

On August 25, nearly 250 first-year Fordham students fanned out across the Bronx as part of Urban Plunge. They served lunch to those in need at POTS—Part of the Solution, where Fordham graduate Jack Marth, FCRH ’86, is the director of programs; they helped refurbish Poe Park and the community-maintained Drew Gardens, adjacent to the Bronx River; and they visited the NWBCCC, now led by Fordham graduate Sandra Lobo, FCRH ’97, GSS ’04.

Students also learned about the Cross Bronx Expressway, a major highway built in the mid-20th century that has been blamed not only for separating Bronx communities but also for worsening air and noise pollution in the borough, contributing to residents’ high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

Before visiting parts of the expressway, students heard from Nilka Martell, founding director of Loving the Bronx, a nonprofit that has been leading community efforts to cap the Cross Bronx and develop public green spaces above and around it. A few years ago, Martell connected with Fordham graduate Alex Levine, FCRH ’14, who was pursuing the same goal.

At Fordham, Levine majored in economics and Chinese studies and interned at the Department of City Planning in the Bronx. By 2020, he was a third-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he co-founded the Bronx One Policy Group, a student advocacy organization focused on capping an approximately 2.5-mile section of the Cross Bronx that runs below street level. The idea is to cover the road with parks and install vents to remove toxic fumes caused by vehicular traffic. They said the cost of the project, estimated to be about $1 billion, would be offset by higher property values and lower health care costs.

“When you think of preventive medicine, it impacts everyone’s life,” Levine told the Bronx Times in 2021. “If we can get a small portion of this capped, then it might be a catalyst to happen on the rest of the highway. This is a project that can save money and lives.”

Martell said Levine’s group connected her with Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who had published a study on the benefits of capping the Cross Bronx.

“We created this perfect trifecta,” she said. They brought their idea to Rep. Ritchie Torres, and in December 2022, the city received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study how to reimagine the Cross Bronx. Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning later received a $25,000 grant from the New York City Department of Transportation as one of only 10 community partners selected to help the department gather input from residents who live near the expressway.

The feasibility-study funding is just a first step, Martell told students during an Urban Plunge panel discussion that featured a representative of the city planning department’s Bronx office and an asthma program manager from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “This isn’t easy,” Martell said. “If this was easy and there was a point-by-point playbook on how to get it done, all these projects would happen.”

But recent Bronx history gives her ample reason to press on. “You know, 40 years ago, we had the restoration of the Bronx River. Fifty years ago, we had the creation of hip-hop.” When there was little support and “no other outlet,” she said, “Bronxites came together to create an outlet.”

“For me, this is what it’s like to be a Bronxite; this is what it’s like to be in the Bronx—to have this kind of energy and these organizing skills to get things done.”

—Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, teaches journalism at Lehman College and is working on a book about the people’s movement that helped rebuild the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s. Taylor Ha is a senior writer and videographer in the president’s office and the marketing and communications division at Fordham.

Take Frances Berko, for example. A pioneer in the disability rights movement, she earned a Fordham Law degree in 1944. By 1949, Berko, who had ataxic cerebral palsy, helped start United Cerebral Palsy. She later served as New York state’s advocate for the disabled.

“I’ve had much success,” she told a panel of legislators in 1981. “But the one achievement which I held most precious—for which I’ve most constantly striven—I’ve never been able to attain completely: that is, the full rights of a citizen of this country and this state.”

That achievement came in 1990 with the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 1994, two years before Berko died, Fordham awarded her an honorary doctorate, and Janet Reno, then U.S. attorney general, called her “a symbol to me of what you can do and how you can do it magnificently.”

Today at Fordham, Berko’s spirit is evident in the work of senior Abigail Dziura, who has focused her research on improving the New York City subway system, where only 27% of all stations are considered fully accessible to people with disabilities.

In April, she earned a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which recognizes college students dedicated to public service. “One of the hardest parts of advocacy work is knowing that you don’t always get to see the end result,” she told Fordham News. “Sometimes you’re setting things up for future generations because something can’t be completed for another 20 years. … But someday, I’d love to see a fully accessible New York subway system.”

The ever-striving, regenerative spirit that links Berko to Dziura and beyond is just one example of Fordham people working to build stronger communities. You’ll find more in our latest “20 in Their 20s” series.

Horbatiuk, an attorney who majored in history at Fordham College at Lincoln Center before earning a J.D. at Fordham Law School, has been enthralled by the storied bivalve since reading Mark Kurlansky’s 2006 book The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. In public talks, he recounts oysters’ emergence as New York City’s leading export in the 19th century, when “New York had street cart vendors selling oysters for a penny a shell.” He also describes the demise of the city’s oyster beds due to overharvesting and pollution.

The Environmental Benefits of Oyster Restoration

In recent years, New Yorkers like Horbatiuk have been reintroducing oysters, not to be eaten but for the environmental benefits—the mollusk’s circulatory system filters contaminants from the city’s waterways, and the reefs help create habitats for other marine life. On Saturday mornings from May through September, he travels to City Island to measure the oysters’ growth, determine how many of them are growing on each craggy shell pulled from Long Island Sound, and pal around with a diverse group of volunteers devoted to the research project.

Measuring and counting the oysters is painstaking work that demands focus and dedication. Horbatiuk clearly has both, as he works methodically through an orange plastic pail filled with oysters affectionally labeled “Kevin’s Bucket.” His volunteer efforts that sunny Saturday morning in August were part of City Island Oyster Reef’s research study on oyster propagation and biodiversity in Long Island Sound. Among the species found living with the oysters that morning were grass shrimp, bristle worms, skillet fish, slipper snails, and boring sponges.

Horbatiuk recalls that in the 1830s, as many as 39 million bushels of oysters were harvested annually, with New York the center of the world’s oyster trade. Since industrialization, however, the oyster beds died. And today’s oysters, while helping to improve water quality by filtering up to 50 gallons of sea water a day, are inedible because the toxins that get filtered out remain in the oyster flesh.

“The history grabbed me first,” said Horbatiuk, who grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and now lives in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. “Very few people realize how important they are historically and what they do for the water’s health.”

‘Oysters for a Penny a Shell’

Horbatiuk’s love of the city’s past dates back to his undergraduate days at the Lincoln Center campus. His favorite courses focused on social and intellectual history, which helped illuminate developments in pop culture in American society.

His Saturday morning efforts on City Island dovetail with his role as a volunteer as an ambassador for the Billion Oyster Project, which does public outreach on oyster restoration and monitors oyster propagation in New York waterways. That outreach includes talks he gives throughout the metropolitan area to New Yorkers interested in learning more about the history of oysters. At his talks, he’ll mention that the Fanny Farmer cookbook from the 1860s had 40 recipes for oyster dishes. He’ll also hearken back to the early 1600s, when the Lenape people, who had lived in the region for centuries, traded oysters with the Dutch and piled them high in middens along the coast.

“It’s an easy sell to the public,” he says. “It just captures their imagination when you tell them you could find oysters in Spuyten Duyvil in the Bronx, and instead of hot dog carts on the street, New York had street cart vendors selling oysters for a penny a shell.”

In June, he manned a table at the New York Philharmonic performance at Lincoln Center that featured three classical pieces inspired by water—one depicted foreboding ocean moods and a vicious storm, while another portrayed the role of water in an Australian myth. During intermission, he chatted with concertgoers about the oyster project.

In mid-July, he participated in the City of Water Day by visiting the Sebago Canoe Club in Jamaica Bay in Brooklyn to talk about conservation and oyster restoration. That same month he spoke at the Beczak Environmental Education Center in Yonkers about the history of oysters in the Hudson River estuary. That’s where he’s a member of the Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club and served as club commodore from 2019 to 2021.

“Kevin may be a lawyer, but he’s found another passion: the history of oysters,” said Bob Walters, executive director of the Beczak Center. “He tells that story with such enthusiasm and passion. And he’ll share what he’s learned at the drop of a hat.”

“Carol Robles was a dynamo her entire life,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a statement. “She devoted herself to public service and made a noteworthy difference both in the lives of Latinos and all New Yorkers. Her passing is a tragedy for her family and all of us.”

A 1983 graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Robles-Román served as deputy mayor for legal affairs during Michael R. Bloomberg’s three-term tenure as mayor, from 2002 through 2013. She was the highest-ranking Latina in city government at that time and the first woman ever to serve as counsel to a New York City mayor.

From City Hall, she oversaw more than a dozen agencies. Her accomplishments include launching the city’s Family Justice Centers to provide free, confidential, and comprehensive assistance to survivors of domestic violence. She also expanded the city’s language-translation services to better meet the needs of non-native English speakers. And she was instrumental in creating the Latin Media and Entertainment Commission to help “bring the best in Latin media and entertainment productions, businesses, and jobs” to the city.

After serving in the Bloomberg administration, she led two national civil rights organizations: Legal Momentum—the Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the Equal Rights Amendment Coalition/Fund for Women’s Equality. In recent years, she had been general counsel and dean of faculty at Hunter College. She also was a longtime member of the City University of New York Board of Trustees.

“Carol Robles-Román dedicated her life to public service and to making our city and country more equal and just,” Bloomberg wrote in a statement, citing her “groundbreaking work to make the city more accessible to our … immigrant and disabled communities, and to stop domestic violence and human trafficking.”

In a 2015 profile in Fordham Magazine, Robles-Román described her approach to identifying societal problems and mobilizing both the political will and the means to fix them.

“Part of my ethos is being a disruptor—in a nice, good way,” she said. “It’s about creating strategic partnerships to make change happen.”

‘Women Can Have a Powerful Voice’

Robles-Román was born in East New York, Brooklyn, on August 27, 1962. Her parents, Emilio and Inéz Robles, owned an insurance brokerage and travel agency, and they were engaged with multiple local civic groups focused on voter registration, housing, and health care, among other issues. They had migrated to New York City from their native Puerto Rico in the mid-1950s, and in the early 1970s, they moved the family to Howard Beach, Queens.

“My mother raised six children—five girls—so it was particularly important to her to teach us, as women of color, that women can have a voice and can have a powerful voice,” Robles-Román once said. “Many women never learn that. That’s the gift she gave me.”

A Puerto Rican Power Couple

After graduating from Stella Maris High School in 1979, Robles-Román enrolled at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where she majored in political science and media studies.

“I felt very, very comfortable speaking in my own voice and being assertive, and in pursuing my joint passions: civics issues and writing,” she told Fordham Magazine in 2002.

In an international law class, she introduced herself to Nelson Román, FCRH ’84, a fellow student of Puerto Rican descent who would become her husband in 1991. Román, who is now a federal judge in the Southern District of New York, worked as a police officer in the Bronx while he was enrolled at Fordham. He told her what he witnessed while responding to domestic violence calls, and the stories he shared left her bothered but determined to help. She researched best practices for handling such incidents and published her work in a Fordham pre-law journal.

“Ever since then, domestic violence and the treatment of women has been an issue that she’s held very close to her soul,” Román told Fordham Magazine in 2015.

A Champion of Sonia Sotomayor

After graduating from Fordham, Robles-Román worked as a paralegal and eventually earned a J.D. from New York University. In the mid-1990s, she met Sonia Sotomayor, then a federal district court judge, through the Puerto Rican Bar Association. Like many young lawyers in the bar association at the time, she came to regard Sotomayor as a mentor.

“She’s a very warm woman, she’s a very nurturing woman, and she also shared her substantive legal intellect with us very early on,” Robles-Román told CNN in 2013.

In the late 1990s, when Nelson Román was president of the Puerto Rican Bar Association, he and Robles-Román helped lead a grassroots campaign to get a Latino justice on the Supreme Court. Sotomayor was on their short list.

A decade later, in May 2009, when President Barack Obama nominated Sotomayor to serve on the nation’s highest court, Robles-Román helped prepare Bloomberg to speak at a congressional hearing in support of her nomination. Three months later, she became the first Latina Supreme Court justice in U.S. history.

“I felt like this is the message Judge Román and I had been sending our whole lives,” Robles-Román said in 2010. “We have excellent Hispanic judges and attorneys, and it feels like it’s been our job to shine a light on that.”

Prior to joining the Bloomberg administration, Robles-Román served as a senior attorney to a family court judge and as special counsel and eventually director of public affairs for the New York State Unified Court System, where she focused on bias matters, among other issues. She also served as a New York state assistant attorney general in the state’s civil rights bureau.

A Mentor to Young People

During her tenure as deputy mayor of New York City, Robles-Román created what she called her Girl Power School talk, which she presented primarily to middle and high schoolers. She encouraged them to focus on the steps—like writing a resume, finding mentors, and developing a network—that will lead them from the classroom to careers of influence.

“Many young women think that people walk around with tags on them that say, ‘I’ll be your mentor.’ I help them empower themselves to say, ‘Hey, I like that teacher. … I’m going to make an appointment and ask that teacher to mentor me … and to give me advice and to help me as my career proceeds,” she told CNN.

In the 2015 Fordham Magazine interview, she added another piece of advice she often shared with young people: “Don’t be shy,” she said. “Do. Not. Be. Shy.”

Robles-Román is survived by her husband, Nelson; their two children, Ariana and Andrés; four sisters; and four nieces and nephews.

“I don’t normally go out on a school night! I’m a teacher. I get up at 4:45 in the morning,” she said shortly before the December 13 performance. “But for this? I am willing to make that sacrifice.”

The show has been a long time coming for Ruffin. She has been an Ailey fan for years—“If you are an inner-city Black girl, you’ve heard of Alvin Ailey,” she said of the famed company, founded and fronted by the boundary-breaking eponymous Black dancer. But she hadn’t been to a show since 2000. A lot of life has passed since then. Ruffin went to Fordham’s Graduate School of Education and earned a master’s degree. Now she teaches seventh-grade public schoolers in Manhattan. And she somehow missed the part where Fordham brags about its partnership with the Ailey School. Since 1998, the two institutions have been offering a joint BFA program through which students learn dance at Ailey while getting a full liberal arts education at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

“I had no idea that Fordham had this connection with Alvin Ailey. And if I would have known that, I would have been humming and bumming for tickets for my teachers a long time ago,” Ruffin said. Does it lend Fordham a little—“Street cred? Absolutely!” Ruffin beamed. “Fordham never—I must admit, they do not cease to surprise me.”

The bond between Fordham and Ailey was on full display that Tuesday evening. The alumni event attracted a varied cohort. Couples, young and old, chatted over wine and cheese plates in the 100-year-old theater’s gilded lobby. Lovers of modern dance came alone; others brought friends. There were families—a couple of teenage daughters sat off to the side on marble stairs, avoiding small talk. Fordham trustee emeritus John Costantino, GABELLI ’67, LAW ’70, did not. “A lot of the programs tonight, they really relate to people,” he said. “They mean something.”

Costantino was talking about the dances—including choreographer Jamar Roberts’ In a Sentimental Mood, which had its world premiere earlier in the year, and three classics by Ailey, who died in 1989: Reflections in D, Cry, and of course Revelations, the 1960 piece that ends nearly every Ailey performance. But he could have been talking about the Ailey/Fordham BFA, too. The program certainly means something to Courtney Celeste Spears, FCLC ’16, one of seven Ailey/Fordham graduates now dancing with the company. She would take the stage later that evening, but first, she addressed a room of Fordham alumni and friends in the lobby—an intimate moment before the lights went down.

“It was such a whirlwind of four years,” Spears said of her college experience. “I think so much of the foundation that I got there shaped me as a young woman, as a professional, as a dancer, as an artist in so many ways. It was such a well-rounded program.” But more than anything? “I always felt just very covered, and safe and advocated for.”

That was music to the ears of Andrew Clark, Ph.D., a Fordham professor of French and comparative literature who also co-directs the BFA program. Clark’s sister was a classical ballet dancer, on her way to a professional career, when she tore the ligaments in her hip. “That totally changed her life. She couldn’t dance ever again. … She had to pick another path,” he said.

Today, the Ailey/Fordham program offers students a best-of-both-worlds approach: a top dance education and a top classroom education in New York City. “Having other curiosities, having other skills and interests and passions [beyond dance is]really important,” Clark said. But don’t think for a second that he doesn’t care about dance. His voice rose talking about the first number of the night: Spears would be dancing with Christopher R. Wilson, FCLC ’17, whom Clark advised when Wilson was an undergrad. He is “such a beautiful dancer, and they dance together all the time and they’re amazing,” Clark said.

Minutes later, the theater filled up. The show began. The program was rhythmic, painful, energetic, beautiful. A New York institution, performing for a hometown crowd. It was worth losing sleep for.

—Jeff Coltin, FCRH ’15, is the City Hall bureau chief at City & State New York and a contributor to this magazine.

The Ailey performance was one of many cultural events hosted throughout the year by Fordham’s Office of Alumni Relations. Learn more at fordham.edu/events.

At its annual benefit, held at Bryant Park Grill in Manhattan on October 20, POTS honored Fordham for “its longstanding partnership and unwavering support for our shared community.”

Christina Hanson, the nonprofit’s executive director, noted that Fordham students, faculty, staff, and alumni have been volunteering, interning, and working at the group’s Webster Avenue location, near the University’s Rose Hill campus, since POTS was established as a tiny storefront soup kitchen in 1982.

Today, POTS is far more than a soup kitchen. Last year alone, it served more than 35,000 people at its three-story building. In addition to its food pantry and the daily meal it offers in its community dining room, POTS helps guests with immediate and long-term needs through services including a barbershop, showers, medical and dental services, a legal clinic, and more.

‘Part of Your Loving Community’

John J. Cecero, S.J., vice president for mission integration and ministry, accepted the award on behalf of the University. He said Fordham shares POTS’ commitment to “the core values of respect, hospitality, and empowerment.”

“For this reason, so many community engaged Fordham constituencies have enthusiastically served at POTS, from the Fordham Kiwanis student leaders who were there from your very beginning, to our present engagement through Urban Plunge, Global Outreach, and Pedro Arrupe volunteers, among others,” Father Cecero said.

“We’re so grateful to be a part of your loving community,” he added, and “we hope to contribute as best we can to these efforts for years to come.”

Recognizing the Dignity of Each Person

The organization also honored former board member Francis J. “Fran” Conroy, GABELLI ’79, for his “leadership, service, and longstanding dedication to the people of the Bronx.”

Upon receiving the award, Conroy, a Fordham graduate and a longtime executive committee member of the Fordham President’s Council, said he was “humbled” by the honor and pleased to “celebrate two organizations that have been very meaningful to me.”

He said he and his wife, the Rev. Anne Conroy, FCRH ’79, met as undergraduates at Fordham, and “despite being a kid from upstate New York, in New York City for the first time, I felt an immediate connection” to the Bronx.

“Besides all the technical skills I learned at Fordham, what I really learned was a sense of gratitude and the desire pay forward my good fortune. Fordham continues to instill that in the students … [who come] from all over the country and have a desire to help their neighbors in need.”

He said he has been drawn to support POTS because “in its soul—and I don’t use that term lightly—it recognizes and respects the dignity of each person who walks through the door. It’s inspiring to see and it challenges us to do likewise.”

“As impressive as the food programs are, and as the legal assistance offered to its clients is, it was the shower, the haircut, the clothing—they seem like small things to most of us. But for many of our neighbors, that’s not the case,” he said. “Being able to take a shower, get a haircut, put on clean clothes, have an address that you can list on a job application or benefits application, that means all the difference in the world.”

Father Cecero told dinner attendees he was “especially humbled” for Fordham to be honored along with Conroy.

“Fran and his wife, Anne, are the generous benefactors of the Conroy Family Endowed Scholarship Fund at Fordham,” he said. “Their commitment to POTS is certainly consistent with how they live their lives for and with others.”

‘We’re in This Together’

Conroy is not the only member of the Fordham community who has served POTS as a board or staff member. Hanson noted that many other Fordham alumni have lent their expertise to the nonprofit throughout its 40-year history, including Jack Marth, FCRH ’86, POTS’ longtime director of programming.

Marth was a first-year student at Fordham when POTS was founded. He volunteered to help, working closely with Ned Murphy, S.J., GSAS ’66, one of the organization’s three co-founders. (Father Murphy died in 2012.)

“Being at POTS was an opportunity to sit down and get to know the people better—not just hand them a plate, but to get to know the reality of the people we serve,” Marth told Fordham Magazine in 2014.

“Father Ned used to say, ‘There is no us and them, it’s we. We’re somehow in this together.’ That’s a message POTS still wants to impart to the students who serve here.”

Here, in a poorly lit first-floor food court on Mott Street, members and guests of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Alumni at Fordham Affinity Chapter turn their heads, suddenly, when the ruckus rambles through the door. Chinatown’s lions have arrived to let the Fordham Rams know about the Year of the Tiger.

Across two large tables, this sprawling, multigenerational group is united by some shared heritage and a lot of shared history: Their families came from China, Korea, and Burma, and now they’ve brought their own spouses and children to dine over char siu bao, congee, rice noodles with dried shrimp, sesame balls with red bean paste, fry bread, and kimchi. Tea tops the table all over: some steaming, some iced with boba bubbles.

Everyone here has some connection to Fordham University. Sure, the school was founded in 1841 primarily for Irish, Catholic immigrants by an Irish immigrant who became the first archbishop of New York, but today it’s everybody. “Is it not delightful,” Confucius asked more than two millennia ago, “to have friends coming from distant quarters?” Some are alumni, some are current students; one man, a Navy lifer, is here just because his two kids went to Fordham and he’s proud about it.

The group formed just a year ago, but that’s not surprising: The pandemic period has been particularly turbulent for Asian Americans, with sporadic incidents of anti-Asian aggression growing more and more frequent. The FBI estimates a 73% increase in such events across the country in 2020, with many of them occurring in New York City. This has led to waves of protest and acts of solidarity amid concerns about how anti-Asian bias is affecting young people in particular.

“I got involved last year,” says Mark Son, a 2010 Fordham Law graduate and one of three co-leaders of the group, which was founded by the Hon. Christopher P. Lee, FCRH ’71, LAW ’79. “I was worried about the anti-Asian-American hate crime. I think it was very important to do this sort of work, trying to keep a voice present in the conversation.”

Son, a principal law clerk with the New York State Supreme Court in the Bronx, views the community and its foundation as a building block to social justice, growth, and learning. “Students had expressed concern,” he adds, “and we wanted alumni to create a network. Even within the Asian American community, we have different subsets: Chinese, Koreans—Kyaw,” he points to Fordham senior Kyaw Hein, eating pork dumplings and listening in on the conversation—“is from Burma. We have a guy from Tonga. So it’s a learning experience for us, as well.”

Edwin Wong, another co-leader of the group, notes how much things have changed from the time he earned an M.B.A. at Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business. “In 2004, it was getting there,” he says of the University’s growing Asian American population, “and now we’ve got lots of Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, and South Asians—a distribution list of more than a thousand people. Before, people took it for granted, but now people are getting engaged with the community.”

While at Fordham, Wong says he started what he calls the Fordham Asian Business Network for students and alumni eager to draw on the collective strength of a growing community in a shrinking world. “You need a network, so I started that,” he says, noting that he and many of the alumni in the group would love to see Fordham launch an Asian American studies program that would grow to become as prominent as the University’s departments of African and African American and Latin American and Latino studies, which have their roots in the late 1960s. (This work is already underway: With support from two University grants—an Arts & Sciences Deans’ Challenge Grant and a Teaching Race Across the Curriculum Grant from the chief diversity officer—a group of 10 Fordham professors is developing a curriculum for a minor in Asian American studies.) Son says that he looks forward to seeing “a community that’s more welcoming,” with more Asian Americans teaching as professors and in leadership positions.

With their small children bedecked in maroon college apparel, some toddling if they’re able to walk at all, the alumni say they plan to return to the neighborhood in just a week, when the largest new year celebrations will kick off. “My hope is that in the future,” says Wong, “we could have a Fordham group march in the larger Manhattan Lunar New Year parade, the same way that Fordham participates in the annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.”

After lunch, they all move through streets chockablock with onlookers and revelers wearing masks, playing games, throwing small fireworks against the sidewalk, and shooting off confetti poppers. The group rambles through the narrow lanes, lingering on Bayard Street, home to many iconic businesses such as the Mei Lai Wah Bakery and the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory. At the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, President Justin Yu welcomes the group, offering them—you guessed it—more food. They talk about both Fordham and their community’s future in a changing world for Asian Americans while nibbling on sweet sponge cake.

It’s not hard to see, as parents unwrap snacks for their littlest, who they have in mind. After all, it’s a new year.

Learn more about the Asian American and Pacific Islander Alumni at Fordham Affinity Chapter on the group’s web page and its Facebook and Instagram accounts.

“I would’ve thought, well, I’ve conquered literature, so I might as well take on another art form, perhaps interpretive dance. But Peter kept writing,” he said. “Thank God for dance.”

In September, several months after reissuing Banished Children of Eve, which earned Quinn a 1995 American Book Award, Fordham University Press reissued his follow-up: a noir-tinged trilogy of historical mysteries spanning much of the 20th century, all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

“I love Raymond Chandler,” Quinn told this magazine in 2017, but “I always felt that his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne.”

Set in New York and Berlin during the late 1930s, Hour of the Cat (2005) starts with a homicide investigation—the murder of a nurse, an innocent man on death row—but grows to include the eugenics movement and the lead-up to the systematized murder of World War II.

In The Man Who Never Returned (2010), it’s the mid-1950s, and a retired Dunne is lured by a media mogul into investigating the still-unsolved 1930 disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater.

In Dry Bones (2013), Dunne comes face to face with both the Holocaust, through his involvement with an ill-fated Office of Strategic Services rescue mission in Slovakia in 1945, and the moral murk of Cold War espionage on the eve of the Cuban revolution.

Throughout the trilogy, Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in history at Fordham, deftly turns historical themes into suspenseful, literary fiction. As Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy once said, Quinn “takes history by the throat and makes it confess,” invariably aiming his writing at questions that matter.

The Fintan Dunne trilogy is published under New York ReLit, a Fordham University Press imprint publishing reissues of historical, literary fiction about New York or written by authors from New York.

Nearly 1,000 Fordham alumni took part in the annual Young Alumni Yacht Cruise, a Homecoming weekend tradition that was canceled last year due to the coronavirus pandemic. Members of the classes of 2020 and 2021—who abruptly shifted to remote learning in their last semester at Fordham and who weathered a year and a half’s worth of virtual and in-person college, respectively—made up most of the crowd at the sold-out event. As undergrads, they had to forgo the usual Senior Week programming, which typically includes a boat cruise for Lincoln Center-based seniors, so many of them were elated to be on board. They felt the alumni event made up for a tradition they missed before graduating.

“I don’t think any of us have been in that kind of crazy-busy celebratory environment since before 2020,” Finley Peay, FCLC ’20, said after the event.

Peay spent the night hopping about the boat’s four decks introducing alumni, taking pictures and videos to share on the alumni Instagram account, and, of course, celebrating with friends along the way: “I actually loved being able to run around and run into friends I hadn’t seen since some of my Rose Hill classes, as well as good friends like old roommates and folks I studied abroad with” in London, Peay said.

As a member of the Young Alumni Committee—the group that helps keep Fordham grads of the past 10 years connected to their alma mater through the cruise and other events and activities throughout the year—Peay was busier than most that night. But she was but one person in a crowd in constant motion, sparking mini reunions at every turn. (Delphine Mason, GABELLI ’20, quipped that the boat setting let her “run around and not worry about losing anyone.”)

Many reunions were brief—glimpses of old acquaintances and one-time classmates led to quick catch-ups on the way to the bathroom, buffet, or bar before each person rejoined the friend group they came with. Some fortunate friends had last seen each other the previous week; others had gone a year or even two since connecting in person. “It’s been forever!” was a common refrain heard in the crowd—as were shouts of glee as old friends recognized each other—amid chatter about Fordham memories and what everyone’s been up to since graduation. Work, grad school, and more have scattered the alumni far and wide, but many returned to New York just to attend the event.

“It was nice to be with the Fordham community since moving to Texas after graduation,” said Michael Finnan, GABELLI ’21, who moved to Dallas to work in finance in September.

A look at the crowd revealed a sea of suits and cocktail dresses in nearly every color—including a healthy amount of Fordham maroon. For some, that was an intentional choice: “What better place to wear maroon?” said Alexa Speciale, FCLC ’20, who had her nails painted to match her jumpsuit.

With a bustling, dressed-up crowd and pop music blaring, the cruise ultimately felt like a deluxe version of the President’s Ball, the annual dance for current undergraduates held that very night under the Homecoming tent on the Rose Hill campus. Instead of appetizers, the attendees enjoyed a full buffet dinner of Caesar salad, chicken francese, salmon, beef, yellow rice, and vegetables, plus an open bar. And instead of the familiar environment of Rose Hill, alumni enjoyed splendid views of the Manhattan and New Jersey skylines. Peay, Finnan, and their friends settled onto the roof just in time to see the Statue of Liberty go by.

Though a DJ played music during the entire cruise, it was halfway through the three-hour event when the dance floor on the lowest deck began to fill. It wasn’t long before it was packed. Disparate clusters of friends came together as one large group, one united Fordham family, pulsing to the music together.

One of the final songs played was “Mamma Mia.” Intentional or not, the lyrics couldn’t have been more fitting for the event: “Here I go again … does it show again … just how much I’ve missed ya?”

—Gillian Russo, FCLC ’21, is an assistant editor at TodayTix Group.

Related Story: “Homecoming Weekend Draws Alumni, Families, and Friends Back to Campus”

“[A]fter a great deal of prayer, reflection, and consultation, I have decided that this will be my last year as President of our beloved University,” Father McShane wrote yesterday in a message to the Fordham family.

“It has been a blessing to work with so many talented and devoted faculty and staff, and with more than a hundred thousand gifted and community-minded students,” he added. “Likewise, I have had the great fortune of working with and on behalf of our many generous and involved alumni and donors, and with the members of our Board of Trustees, especially the Board Chairs with whom I have worked: Paul Guenther, John Tognino and Bob Daleo. Together they have been the engines of Fordham’s success, over which it has been my great joy to preside.”

Father McShane succeeded Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., on July 1, 2003, to become the 32nd president of Fordham. By next June, he will have served 19 years in the position, matching his predecessor’s record as the University’s longest-serving president.

Under Father McShane, Fordham completed a decades-long transformation from well-regarded regional institution to prestigious national university—growing larger, academically and fiscally stronger, and more diverse than ever.

Since 2003, Father McShane has raised $1 billion for the University, overseen the quadrupling of its endowment to more than $1 billion, and invested $1 billion in new construction and infrastructure improvements.

His tenure has also been marked by record-breaking advances in enrollment; campus expansions in New York and London; innovative new academic programs and partnerships; increased support for student-faculty collaboration and research; a renewed commitment to community engagement; and a burgeoning global alumni network—all of which have helped lift Fordham to new levels of national and international distinction and influence.

“The Board of Trustees and the Fordham community have watched with admiration Father McShane’s unbridled energy, pastoral care, long devotion, and deep wisdom,” Robert D. Daleo, GABELLI ’72, chair of the Fordham University Board of Trustees, wrote today in a letter to the Fordham community. “We are deeply grateful for all he has done for the University and its students, faculty, staff, alumni, and parents.”

Daleo said the University will work with global executive search firm WittKieffer and establish a search committee composed of trustees, faculty, staff, and students to identify the next president of Fordham. WittKieffer will hold a series of virtual town halls this fall to solicit input from the Fordham community, he said. And he expects the board to announce the new president next spring. (More information about the transition is posted at fordham.edu/presidentialsearch.)

In the meantime, the University will have the opportunity to “celebrate Father McShane and his many accomplishments throughout the year,” Daleo wrote.

“His leadership has set the stage for the next president to continue Fordham’s growth and prominence.”

A Leader of Character

Throughout his tenure as president, Father McShane has described a Fordham education as “ever ancient, ever new,” borrowing a phrase from St. Augustine.

“We are ever searching for greater opportunities for service that the signs of the times reveal to us and demand of us,” he said during his inaugural address in the Rose Hill Gymnasium on October 24, 2003. And yet a Fordham education is timeless, he said, and fundamentally about character development—supporting, challenging, and empowering students to become global citizens whose lives are marked by “competence, conscience, compassion, and commitment to the cause of the human family.”

When historians of Fordham look back on the McShane era, they will undoubtedly note a host of key indicators of growth and success at the University (see the list below), but just as impressive, trustees and others in higher education say, is Father McShane’s influence as a leader of character—someone who is quick-witted, morally focused, and personally humble but bold and full of ambition for Fordham.

“Father McShane has been an incredible leader, and Fordham has become a new and better institution under his leadership,” said Fordham Trustee Valerie Rainford, FCRH ’86. “He leaves a legacy of excellence, integrity, and perseverance not just with the Fordham family but with the broader community, all guided by his faith and an unwavering commitment to helping his fellow man and woman achieve their God-given gifts. He is a giant in academia who leaves behind big shoes to fill.”

In his message to the Fordham family, Father McShane deflected any praise for what the University has achieved.

“I have utterly no illusions about how all of this was accomplished and what my role has been. I believe (actually I know) that all that has been accomplished at Fordham in the course of the past eighteen years is not the result of my work,” he wrote. “Rather, it has been the result of uncommon teamwork, a shared dream and a deep devotion to the values that Fordham has always stood for and from which it has derived its strength.”

Beyond Fordham, Father McShane is widely regarded as an eloquent, tireless advocate for Jesuit education and for improving college access overall. He has served on the boards of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), several Jesuit institutions, and the American Council on Education.

“For more than his 25 years at Fordham, Father McShane has been an important voice for Catholic higher education, for Jesuit universities, and, indeed, for the importance of public and private support for education of all citizens, especially the marginalized and those who have been deprived of this critical opportunity,” said AJCU President Michael J. Garanzini, S.J. “His energy and enthusiasm have inspired many of us to advocate for the promotion of access and inclusion in private and public education alike.”

By the Numbers: A Legacy of Transformation

Here are 10 key indicators of growth and success at Fordham under Father McShane’s leadership.

• Enrollment and Diversity: Applications for undergraduate admission have more than tripled, from 12,801 in 2003 to 46,171 this year. And the percentage of undergraduate students from underrepresented groups has increased from 23% in 2003 to 33% this year. The undergraduate Class of 2025, drawn from 45 U.S. states and 51 countries, is the most diverse in Fordham’s history, with 44.5% domestic students of color and 6.5% international students.

  

• Social Mobility: The Chronicle of Higher Education placed Fordham at No. 15 on its list of “Colleges with the Highest Student-Mobility Rates,” a ranking that measures whether recent graduates’ income surpasses that of their parents. First-generation college students make up 23% of the undergraduate Class of 2025.
• Fundraising: Fordham has raised more than $1 billion since 2003. That’s more than the University had raised in its entire 162-year history prior to Father McShane’s tenure as president.
• Endowment: The University’s endowment has more than quadrupled, from $241.2 million in 2003 to more than $1 billion today.
• Scholarships and Financial Aid: With support from donors, the University created more than 400 new scholarship funds for students, including 197 as part of Faith & Hope | The Campaign for Financial Aid, which raised more than $175 million for students between 2014 and 2019.

  

• Access and Affordability: The University increased spending on financial aid from $48 million in 2003 to more than $300 million this year. Today, 90% of first-year undergraduates receive some form of financial aid from Fordham.
• Endowed Chairs and External Grants: To help attract and retain more of the world’s leading scholars and educators, Fordham dramatically increased its number of endowed faculty chairs—from 23 to 71. The University also bolstered its Office of Research, increasing funding from external sources by 85%, from $13 million in 2003 to $24 million in 2021.
• Academic Achievement: Fordham students have earned 2,121 prestigious fellowships and scholarships, including 158 Fulbright awards, since 2003, placing the University among the nation’s top producers of Fulbright scholars.
• Academic and Residential Facilities: Since 2003, Fordham has invested more than $1 billion in major capital projects, including a current $205 million renovation and expansion of the campus center at Rose Hill.

  

• National Rankings: Fordham has leaped 18 places in U.S. News & World Report’s national college rankings, from No. 84 in 2003 to No. 66. Several of Fordham’s graduate and professional schools also advanced in the rankings: Fordham Law is No. 27; the Graduate School of Social Service is No. 25; the Graduate School of Education is No. 39; and the graduate division of the Gabelli School of Business is No. 58, with three program areas—finance (15), international business (15), and marketing (14)—among the top 20 in the nation.

A ‘Mystical Regard’ for Fordham

In late 2002, when Father McShane was appointed to lead Fordham, he was in his fifth year as president of the University of Scranton, a post he held until June 2003. But he was no stranger to the Fordham community.

A New York City native, he taught theology and served as the dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill from 1992 to 1998. Prior to that, he was a member of the University’s Board of Trustees. And though he completed his studies elsewhere—earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Boston College, M.Div. and S.T.M. degrees from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in the history of Christianity from the University of Chicago—Fordham was in his DNA.

As a boy, he attended basketball games and alumni reunions at Rose Hill with his father, Owen P. McShane, a graduate of Fordham College and Fordham Law School who instilled in his four sons a “mystical regard” for Fordham.

“It was my first experience of a college campus, and it was a place that was larger than life,” Father McShane said during a September 2003 media roundtable with alumni and student journalists. “But as time went on, it occurred to me that Fordham was a mystical place for my father because he was the first person in his family to go to college. It was the institution that made his life, changed his life.”

That deep sense of Fordham as a place of personal and communal transformation, particularly for first-generation college students, has been a keynote of Father McShane’s administration.

In his message to the Fordham family announcing his decision to step down as president, he noted that in addition to his father, each of his three brothers earned a degree from Fordham.

“Fordham breathed life into their dreams and formed their lives in powerful ways,” he wrote. “Through their stories and the example of their lives, I came to understand the transformative power of the Jesuit education they received here.”

‘Ever Upward’: An Ambitious Agenda for Fordham

Soon after his inauguration, Father McShane led the University community through a yearlong strategic planning process. The goal was to draw on Fordham’s historic strengths, recent accomplishments, and untapped potential—particularly at the Lincoln Center campus—to lift the University to a position of greater prominence.

In March 2009, he announced that through Excelsior | Ever Upward | The Campaign for Fordham, the University would seek to raise $500 million to renew itself physically, spiritually, and academically.

By 2014, more than 60,000 alumni and friends had contributed $540 million, propelling the University well beyond its fundraising goal. Together they helped the University create more than 220 scholarships, build residence halls for a total of 800-plus students at Rose Hill and Lincoln Center, and bolster the faculty with the creation of nearly 50 endowed chairs in business, law, Catholic theology, Judaic studies, STEM, and other fields.

A Historic Investment in Business Education

The single largest contribution during the campaign came in 2010 from the Gabelli Foundation, a gift that has strengthened Fordham’s ability to provide a purpose-driven business education in the financial capital of the world.

Mario J. Gabelli, a 1965 Fordham graduate, and his wife, Regina Pitaro, a 1976 graduate of Fordham College at Rose Hill, announced their historic $25 million gift to Fordham on September 25, 2010, before the start of the annual Homecoming football game. At the time, it was the largest single gift in Fordham’s history—superseded 10 years later, in December 2020, when Gabelli and Pitaro made a $35 million gift to the University.

Gabelli and Pitaro’s support has allowed the business school to strengthen and expand its faculty, create a Ph.D. program, launch a bachelor’s degree program in global business at the Lincoln Center campus, and fund scholarships and research, among other initiatives. In gratitude, the University renamed its undergraduate business college the Gabelli School of Business—and in 2015, Fordham unified its undergraduate, graduate, and executive business programs under the Gabelli name.

Alumni support also helped the University complete a two-year renovation of Hughes Hall, which reopened in 2012 as the permanent Rose Hill home of the Gabelli School.

Lincoln Center Rising

One of the most visible, dramatic legacies of Father McShane’s tenure as president is the transformation of the Lincoln Center campus.

When the campus was built during the 1960s, it was designed to accommodate 3,500 students. By the early 21st century, it was bursting at the seams, with 8,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Fordham Law, long regarded as one of the best law schools in the country, was serving 1,500 students in a building designed for 650.

Under Father McShane’s leadership, the University developed and eventually earned New York City approval to enact a master plan for expanding the campus—the first stage of which was the construction of a new law school and undergraduate residence hall.

The new Fordham Law School opened in fall 2014. Designed by world-renowned architectural firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, the 22-story building has not only reshaped the campus but also added a touch of elegance to the Manhattan skyline. The law school occupies the first nine floors, and McKeon Hall, a residence for more than 400 undergraduates, rises above it.

U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor was among the dignitaries at the dedication ceremony for the new building. She spoke warmly of Father McShane’s leadership. “You have given a special spirit to this University, and I’m so pleased to be here,” she said. “Fordham never ceases to amaze me.”

Two years later, Fordham completed a gut renovation of 140 West 62nd Street, former home of the law school, transforming it into a campus center with a three-story library, a student lounge and café, health and counseling centers, career services offices, and abundant space for classrooms and student activities. The renovated building also serves as a home for the Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center.

An Increasingly Global University

Fordham also extended its influence beyond New York City in dramatic fashion during Father McShane’s tenure.

In 2008, Fordham opened its Westchester campus in West Harrison, New York—a home away from home for the School of Professional and Continuing Studies as well as the graduate schools of Business, Education, Religion and Religious Education, and Social Service.

A decade later, Fordham established a home of its own in the United Kingdom’s most cosmopolitan city. Fordham London, a six-story building in the city’s Clerkenwell neighborhood, opened in fall 2018 to more than 300 undergraduates from Fordham and other U.S. universities.

At the London campus, students take courses in business and the liberal arts while interning in marketing, banking, media, health science, and other fields. “A big part of Fordham’s educational approach is applied learning, using the city as our campus, and London provides a whole new way to do that,” Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the Gabelli School of Business, said at the time.

The University also bolstered its longstanding partnership with Peking University in Beijing and established a partnership with the University of Pretoria in South Africa, where students pursue research in emerging markets, among other subjects, and take part in the Ubuntu Service Learning program.

During Father McShane’s tenure, Fordham increased its study abroad options to 110 programs in 52 countries. Prior to the pandemic, the University ranked No. 31 in the country for the number of students it sends abroad each year, according to the Institute of International Education.

Academic Growth and Partnerships

During his six years as dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill during the 1990s, Father McShane prioritized faculty development and student scholarship.

Soon after returning to Fordham as president, he picked up where he left off, establishing the Office of Prestigious Fellowships to help students compete for and win prestigious postgraduate scholarships to further their intellectual and personal growth. The results have been impressive: Since 2003, Fordham students have earned 2,121 prestigious fellowships and scholarships, including 158 Fulbright awards, placing the University among the nation’s top producers of Fulbright scholars.

Father McShane also encouraged faculty and administrators to renew and develop innovative academic programs to meet students’ needs. Since 2003, the University has not only launched a host of new degree programs—in public media, health administration, and international humanitarian action, to name a few—but also established academic centers, including the Center on National Security and the Center on Race, Law and Justice, where faculty and students advance research and public discourse to address some of the most urgent challenges of the 21st century.

Fordham has also emerged as a global leader in cybersecurity education in the past decade, thanks in part to a partnership with the FBI.

Since 2009, the University has worked with the FBI to organize and host the International Conference on Cyber Security, or ICCS. Typically held every 18 months, the conference attracts top security and law enforcement officials, university researchers, and executives from companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Google.

Fordham also established a master’s degree program in cybersecurity, which has tripled in enrollment since 2016. The National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security have designated Fordham a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education, and last year, the NSA awarded the University a $3 million grant to lead an effort to help historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions develop their own cybersecurity programs.

New York City: Partner in Education

While Fordham has become an increasingly prominent national and global university in the past two decades, it continues reaching out to its local communities through service, academic partnerships, and various other initiatives such as the Higher Education Opportunity Program (HEOP) and the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP) for students from underrepresented groups.

In his inaugural address in 2003, Father McShane described the University’s longstanding ties to New York City, and he challenged the Fordham community to find new ways to learn from its neighbors and contribute to their well-being.

“The city that we are proud to call our home is not merely our address,” he said. “It is and has been our partner in education, our laboratory, and our classroom from the moment that Archbishop Hughes first stepped foot on Rose Hill Manor to launch the great enterprise of Catholic higher education in the Northeast in 1841.”

More than ever before, New York is on the syllabus for Fordham students. During Father McShane’s tenure, Fordham established and reinforced partnerships with some of the city’s top civic and educational institutions.

In 2012, for example, Fordham joined four other renowned Bronx institutions—the New York Botanical Garden, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the Bronx Zoo/Wildlife Conservation Society, and Montefiore Medical Center—to create the Bronx Science Consortium. The partnership has increased collaborative research and educational opportunities for students and scientists, and helped elevate the borough’s status as a critical contributor to New York’s “Eds and Meds” sector—the academic, research, and medical institutions that drive innovation and help fuel the city’s economy.

Fordham has also strengthened its internships program, which has grown to include more than 3,500 partner organizations, and given students many more ways to get involved in community-based work.

The Center for Community Engaged Learning, established in 2018, oversees both Urban Plunge, the pre-orientation program that introduces first-year students to New York City through service, and Global Outreach, which connects students with community-based organizations in the U.S. and abroad to help them better understand social justice issues at the ground level.

The center also helps faculty develop courses that connect students with local organizations working to understand societal problems and promote the common good. The number of community engaged learning courses has increased from seven to 52 in just the past few years.

During Father McShane’s tenure, Fordham also established the Social Innovation Collaboratory, a network of students, faculty, administrators, alumni, and community members working together to promote social innovation for the achievement of social justice, social entrepreneurship, and environmental sustainability.

In 2014, Fordham became one of 45 colleges and universities to be designated a “Changemaker Campus” by Ashoka, a global organization that honors universities for innovative efforts to foster social good and strengthen society.

Community and Civic Leadership

Through his own civic engagement, Father McShane has set the tone for the University’s deepening involvement with the life of the city.

He has served on the board of the Museum of Civil Rights in Harlem, for example; on mayoral task forces on the future of higher education, the future of media, and workforce development; on an advisory board for the Metropolitan Transit Authority; and on the New York City Charter Revision Commission, appointed by then mayor Michael Bloomberg in 2010. In 2017, he was honored by the 100 Year Association for Fordham’s commitment to community service and its contributions to New York City.

On the state level, Father McShane served two terms as chair of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (CICU), an Albany-based nonprofit organization that represents the chief executives of New York’s colleges and universities on issues of public policy.

“Father McShane is an indefatigable voice for higher education and its ability to transform lives,” said former CICU president Mary Beth Labate. “As a twice-elected chair of the commission, Father was extraordinarily generous with his time and talents in the quest to insure that students, no matter their socioeconomic background, had access to a high quality education.

“When I accompanied him in the halls of the state capitol, he was greeted like the rock star that he is. The size of his contributions was only outmatched by the size of his heart. Colleges and students across the state owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Most recently, Father McShane served on the New York Forward Advisory Board to help shape the state’s plan for reopening after the pandemic, drawing on his experiences leading the Fordham community through some of the most challenging years in its history.

Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

In early March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread throughout the U.S., Father McShane, like many other university presidents and chief executives, faced a crisis for which there was no playbook.

He made what he called the “difficult but necessary decision” to suspend face-to-face classes on March 9 and transition to remote learning for the rest of the semester. Then he established the Fordham Forward Task Force, which worked to prepare the University for reopening safely on the ground for the 2020–2021 academic year and again this year.

Finally, he identified three priorities that continue to guide the University’s decision-making throughout the crisis: protect the University’s people; preserve the University’s ability to provide students with a world-class Jesuit education; and “emerge from the pandemic with the strength needed to fulfill our mission and to confront the challenges of the future with renewed hope and vigor.”

Father McShane worked closely with the task force, the Board of Trustees, the Faculty Senate, and the finance office to balance the 2020 and 2021 budgets, which had $38 million and $105 million gaps, respectively, as a result of the fallout from the pandemic.

“Leadership is a risky business, even in the best of circumstances, because it is asking people to change, often to sacrifice,” said Donna M. Carroll, president emerita of Dominican University and a trustee fellow of Fordham University. “Father McShane has been focused and persistent in his service to Fordham, navigating difficult conversations with patience, candor, and encouragement. Fordham’s strength in the aftermath of the pandemic is a tribute to his sustained leadership, though he would be the first to highlight the contributions of others.”

By the conclusion of the 2020–2021 academic year, as pandemic-related restrictions began to ease temporarily across the country, Fordham hosted a series of diploma ceremonies on Edwards Parade. Father McShane saluted the Class of 2021 for its perseverance: “You never surrendered. Rather, you rose to every challenge that the world threw at you,” he said.

He also noted that graduates completed their studies in a year marked not only by a global pandemic but also by an economic downturn, a reckoning with racism, and an assault on the U.S. Capitol and the democratic principles upon which our nation has been built and sustained.

“The toll these cascading plagues has taken on all of us, and on you in a special way, has been enormous,” he said. “With ease and grace, you became one another’s keepers, and in the process, you became ministers of cura personalis to one another,” he said, referring to the Jesuit principle of “care of the whole person” that is at the heart of a Fordham education.

Fighting Racism, Educating for Justice

Father McShane has made a renewed commitment to anti-racism a top priority of his final years in office. In a State of the University address delivered virtually on September 12, 2020, he noted that the preceding academic year had marked not only the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic but also the “blossoming of a new civil rights movement aimed at addressing racism in our country.”

In June 2020, after the May 25 killing of George Floyd galvanized global protests against racial injustice—and amid cries from the heart of the Fordham community—Father McShane put forth a plan to address systemic racism and do more to build a diverse, inclusive, and affirming community at Fordham.

“The heartfelt testimony given by members of our community in the course of the summer has made it searingly clear that racism is also present here at Fordham,” Father McShane said, referring to stories of discrimination students and alumni of color shared, largely on social media.

“As painful as that admission may be, we must face up to it. Therefore, let me be clear: anti-racism, diversity, and inclusion are institutional and mission priorities at Fordham, priorities that grow out of our identity as an American, Catholic, and Jesuit institution located in the City of New York.”

He added: “With regard to confronting racism, let us be honest. This is and will be an ongoing challenge, for we will be called upon to confront both the kind of blatant, brutal racism that was behind the deaths of George Floyd and so many others of our sisters and brothers, and the racism of indifference that gives blatant racism its real power: the racism of the blind eye, the racism of silence, and the racism of self-absolution.”

The Board of Trustees approved the plan, which Father McShane crafted in concert with the offices of the provost and the chief diversity officer. The board also charged the newly renamed Mission and Social Justice Committee to oversee the University’s anti-racism strategy, and the trustees mandated annual anti-racism training for all faculty, students, staff, and administrators—including the president’s cabinet and the board itself.

Continuing the Mission: ‘Bothered Excellence’

Throughout his tenure, Father McShane has made an eloquent case for what he calls “the urgent purpose” behind Jesuit education. It’s a purpose that is at the heart of the University’s anti-racism efforts and its latest strategic plan, Educating for Justice.

“We want nothing less than to leave you bothered for the rest of your lives,” he told admitted students in an April 2020 video, “bothered by the realization that you don’t know everything and that there are discoveries and adventures waiting for you just over the horizon, and by the realization that there is injustice in the world, injustice that cries out for a caring response.”

By any measure, Father McShane’s presidency has been transformative. There are the new buildings, new programs, and record-breaking advances in enrollment and fundraising. But beyond the data and tangible evidence of growth, he has embodied the values of the University, trustees say, and placed Fordham in a position to strengthen its mission.

“I cannot imagine a finer leader during his tenure—the personification of the ideal Jesuit, a superb scholar, and a true New Yorker,” said Edward M. Stroz, GABELLI ’79, a Fordham trustee. “Whether measured by student applications and graduations, growth of the endowment, or the cultivation of Fordham’s presence in New York, what Father McShane has done is extraordinary and a source of pride for us all. He will leave Fordham in a very strong position for continuing its mission for our students in the future.”

Another Fordham trustee, Anthony Carter, FCRH ’76, a co-chair of the board’s Mission and Social Justice Committee, spoke about the pastoral quality of Father McShane’s leadership.

“In addition to being a generous servant of God with abundant love for Fordham, he has served us all with a kind heart, purity of spirit, faith-driven humility, and passion for diversity and inclusiveness,” Carter said. “In order to burnish Father McShane’s impressive legacy into the history books and our hearts, we should all strive to imitate his gentle soul and love for humankind.”

For Nora Ahern Grose, GABELLI ’84, who has been a member of the Board of Trustees for 10 years, the year ahead will be an emotional one.

“[Father McShane] has challenged us, in his self-effacing and kind manner, to advance the mission, quality, and portrait of Fordham to distinct and exceptional heights,” she said. “We look forward to another year of his leadership, a year when every laugh and tear, every celebration of accomplishment, every quiet moment of prayer and reflection with our dear Father McShane will have even greater significance than previously.

“We will say thank you many times, and he will always reply that he was the grateful one.”

Tributes to Father McShane

As Father McShane announced his plan to step down in June 2022, current and former Fordham trustees and other leaders in higher education expressed their appreciation and deep gratitude for his service on behalf of the University and its people.

You have been an amazing leader, Joe—for Fordham and for the rest of us in higher education. You’ve also been a friend and I value that a great deal.

—Stephen Ainlay, Former President, Union College

When I learned that this is your last year leading Fordham University, I wanted to thank you on behalf of CICU for your tremendous contributions over the years. Your service on the CICU board has left a lasting impact, as has your leadership in New York state and in our sector. While I and CICU staff are sorry to lose you as an advocate, we look forward to working with you during the remainder of your tenure. Congratulations on your impending retirement. I wish you many healthy, happy, and fulfilling years.

—Lola W. Brabham, President, Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (CICU)

As chairman of the search committee 18 years ago, it was my privilege to put forward the recommendation of Joseph McShane, S.J., as president of Fordham University. It was a great day for Fordham, as have been the subsequent soon to be 19 years that have followed. The University has flourished under his leadership and caring nature for every individual. It has been a wonderful personal and professional pleasure knowing him, and I wish him continued success as he completes this farewell year as Fordham’s president.

—Robert E. Campbell, GABELLI ’55, Trustee Emeritus and Former Chair, Fordham University Board of Trustees; Retired Vice Chairman, Johnson & Johnson

Joseph McShane, S.J., is recognized among Catholic university leaders and within his New York colleague group as a stunningly successful, mission-driven president. Intense, passionate, and charismatically articulate, he has transformed Fordham University from a strong regional institution to a national leader—increasing quality, enrollment, and reputation, and resulting in skyrocketing alumni support.

Leadership is a risky business, even in the best of circumstances, because it is asking people to change, often to sacrifice. Father McShane has been focused and persistent in his service to Fordham, navigating difficult conversations with patience, candor, and encouragement. Fordham’s strength in the aftermath of the pandemic is a tribute to his sustained leadership, though he would be the first to highlight the contributions of others.

I have known Joe McShane since we worked together at Fordham in the early ’90s, then as a trustee and through two high-impact presidencies. He is one of the most intelligent, quick witted, generous people that I know. The presidency can wear you down, but Joe is always upbeat, forward-looking, and engaged. He has been a lasting gift to Fordham.

—Donna M. Carroll, President Emerita, Dominican University; Trustee Fellow, Fordham University

As a proud Fordham University trustee, I have been blessed to have worked with Father Joseph McShane, Reverend President as I affectionately call him. I’ve watched with admiration, appreciation, and at times awe as he has fulfilled so many of his dreams, goals, and objectives for our beloved Fordham University. The state of the University is in an enviable position because of his leadership.

There are so many memories about our Reverend President I will cherish forever. In addition to being a generous servant of God with abundant love for Fordham, he has served us all with a kind heart, purity of spirit, faith-driven humility, and passion for diversity and inclusiveness.

In order to burnish Father McShane’s impressive legacy into the history books and our hearts, we should all strive to imitate his gentle soul and love for humankind.

—Anthony Carter, FCRH ’76, Fordham University Trustee; Former Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer, Johnson & Johnson

Father McShane has been a Casey family friend since his days as president of the University of Scranton. His commitment to the education of our next generation of leaders and Fordham’s academic excellence is unparalleled. Throughout his career, he was driven by the Jesuit mission to prepare graduates whose lives are marked by character, conscience, competence, compassion, and commitment to cause of the human family. The University of Scranton and Fordham are better institutions because of his faith, vision, and leadership. I wish him well in this next chapter of his life.

—U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, PAR ’19

AMDG. It’s hard to imagine Fordham University without Father Joseph M. McShane, S.J., as its chief visionary, leader, promoter, and president. He is a profound and constant example to the Fordham community and the world of how one person can make such a magnificent difference in people’s lives. His record of achievement over his long, successful tenure certainly can be measured by the beautiful enhancements to Fordham’s capital plant, endowment growth, and funds raised, each of which exceeds or will soon exceed $1 billion. Of even greater and inestimable value are Father McShane’s positive impact on students, Fordham’s standing in the world, and his constant adherence to Ignatian principles. His legacy will secure Fordham’s foundations for generations to come, and we are grateful for his leadership, devotion, and service that made it all possible.

—Gerald C. Crotty, FCRH ’73, Trustee Fellow, Fordham University; President, Weichert Enterprise, LLC

We have had the privilege of knowing and working with Father McShane for more than two decades in his roles as president of Fordham and dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. In that time he has transformed Fordham through his wise leadership and prodigious fundraising, raising the University to national prominence. He has also been the soul of the University—its pastor in chief. In times of crisis and grief he has consoled the on-campus community, and thousands of alumni spread across the globe, including us. We will greatly miss his intelligence, deep wisdom, and compassion.

—Maurice J. (Mo) Cunniffe, FCRH ’54, and Carolyn Dursi Cunniffe, Ph.D., GSAS ’71

Take it from me: leadership and administration today is not a blissful task. Father McShane did it with gusto, effectiveness, cheer, and wisdom for 19 years. Thanks, Joe! We’ll miss you!

—Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York

My family and I have been beneficiaries of Father McShane’s counsel, his guidance on matters of faith, and his friendship for the 20 or so years we have known him, from his days as dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill to his current position as president of the finest Catholic University in the nation. He has often described himself as the Flaherty family priest, an honor greatly appreciated by the 18 of us. He has, after all, baptized one grandson, blessed the wedding of our son Kevin, and buried my wife, mother of four and Nana of 10, all in the last 6 years. A brief disclosure: Kevin was Jane’s favorite child; we all knew that. I hate to break the news to Father McShane, but Father O’Hare was Jane’s favorite Jesuit.

I shall be sorry when he leaves for my selfish reasons, but also because I believe the University will be poorer for his absence in many respects. Firstly, he has been the best fundraiser we’ve had here. I’ve been told that anyone can raise funds; I hope trustees are correct. Secondly, he believes he is a priest first and president second; I think he has his priorities right. And lastly, of course, his Irishness permeates his smile, his interaction with students, and even his relationship with trustees and faculty; no easy task that.

He will be missed by me and I suspect by the University over the coming years.

—James P. Flaherty, FCRH ’69, Fordham University Trustee; Founder and Chairman, International Health Investor

During Father McShane’s presidency, Fordham has undergone a renaissance. The University today boasts strong admission numbers, a record endowment, and many successful capital improvements. In perhaps the greatest tests of his steadfast leadership, he has expertly navigated the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 and currently the COVID-19 pandemic.

As his 19-year mark and retirement approach, we extend our deepest gratitude for his exemplary service, along with all good wishes for the future.

—Mario Gabelli, B.S. ’65, Alumnus, Namesake, and Benefactor of the Gabelli School of Business; and Regina Pitaro, FCRH ’76

For more than his 25 years at Fordham, Father McShane has been an important voice for Catholic higher education, for Jesuit universities, and, indeed, for the importance of public and private support for education of all citizens, especially the marginalized and those who have been deprived of this critical opportunity. His energy and enthusiasm have inspired many of us to advocate for the promotion of access and inclusion in private and public education alike. I suspect that, while he may be stepping down from the presidency at Fordham, he will find a way to continue his service and advocacy. He is still very much needed and appreciated.

—Michael J. Garanzini, S.J., President, Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities

There may be a more riveting speaker, a greater inspirer of youth, a better leader or a sharper wit than Father McShane, but having all of these qualities in his abundance is truly exceptional. He has challenged us, in his self-effacing and kind manner, to advance the mission, quality, and portrait of Fordham to distinct and exceptional heights. We look forward to another year of his leadership, a year when every laugh and tear, every celebration of accomplishment, every quiet moment of prayer and reflection with our dear Father McShane will have even greater significance than previously.

We will say thank you many times, and he will always reply that he was the grateful one.

—Nora Ahern Grose, GABELLI ’84, Fordham University Trustee

Father McShane has led Fordham through a period of continued national uncertainty. During his presidency, Fordham has gained academic strength, broadened our national student population, and led fundraising which resulted in an endowment topping $1 billion. He will be missed, but his legacy foretells a bright future for our University.

—Paul Guenther, FCRH ’62, Trustee Emeritus and Former Chair, Fordham University Board of Trustees; Retired President, PaineWebber

Father McShane has been an absolutely remarkable leader for Fordham University and, indeed, for all of higher education in the United States during his career. On every significant national issue involving the Catholic Church, the Society of Jesus, or the role of independent colleges and universities over the past 25 years, Father McShane has been a wise, insightful, and vocal leader who has shaped the discussion and pointed the way forward. Along the way, he has become a trusted friend and adviser to so many of us. To say that his considerable contributions in so many circles will be missed is a vast understatement.

—John J. Hurley, President, Canisius College

Father McShane has been an incredible steward of our beloved Fordham over these many years, and his bold vision has propelled us to places we had only once dreamed about. His fearlessness has empowered and positively impacted Fordham in too many ways to capture in a few sentences. However, the place where I believe he has made an indelible mark is in the area of fundraising, when he insisted that Fordham start to dream bolder dreams and fundraise in a way to ensure we attain those dreams.

Because of Father, a new culture of giving at Fordham blossomed and continues to grow and strengthen.

I have been proud to witness firsthand the love, commitment, vision, and passion Father McShane has for the University. By continuing to push and by always keeping his eyes on the horizon, Father McShane has not only secured Fordham’s place but has set the University on the path to greatness. I do not think it is an overstatement to say that other than John Hughes, the founder of Fordham, no other single individual has had such an immense, lasting, and powerful impact on the University.

What Father has done will impact every person who steps foot on the campuses of Fordham University for generations. However, he also has had positive impacts on so many people on very personal levels. He has enriched my life and has been a wonderful friend who provided strength and love when most needed. I know that there are so many in the Fordham community who have had the same experience.

Honestly, all I can say to Father is thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for all you have done for every member of the Fordham family.

—Darlene Luccio Jordan, FCRH ’89, Fordham University Trustee; Co-Chair, Excelsior | Ever Upward | The Campaign for Fordham and Faith & Hope | The Campaign for Financial Aid; Executive Director, The Gerald R. Jordan Foundation

Father, your announcement surprised me, as I instinctively think of you and Fordham as synonymous and everlasting. No person certainly is ever indispensable, but you come as close as anyone in my lifetime because every aspect of Fordham under your leadership has fundamentally improved. Most importantly, the quality of our values-based education in strengthening the moral and spiritual underpinning of our students’
character development. I have had so much feedback from our students through the years during your leadership as they openly expressed their devotion and gratitude to Fordham for changing their lives. Feel good about the tens of thousands of our graduates who are leading productive and quality life experiences propelled and advanced by their transformational Fordham experience.

You touched every aspect of Fordham in improving student selection, staff/faculty hiring, the everyday functioning of the University, the athletic programs, facilities management, and, of course, your extraordinarily successful fundraising campaigns. Father, you established a strong financial foundation securing Fordham’s future. You were also Fordham’s greatest champion and you made us all proud of our Fordham experience enlisting so many of us in your journey to make Fordham even better.

I wish you all the very best that life has to offer as you transition to a new role, but please know how grateful we are for your leadership and your friendship. I truly value how you were there for me during my most difficult life challenge, the loss of Terry after 55 years. Providing comfort to me and my family and offering her funeral Mass and service at Arlington will always be close to our hearts. May God’s blessing be upon you, dear friend. Much love and respect.

—Jack Keane, GABELLI ’66, Trustee Fellow, Fordham University; Former Vice Chief of Staff, U.S. Army; Chairman, Institute for the Study of War

Father McShane is an indefatigable voice for higher education and its ability to transform lives. As a twice-elected chair of the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (CICU), Father was extraordinarily generous with his time and talents in the quest to ensure that students, no matter their socioeconomic background, had access to a high-quality education. When I accompanied him in the halls of the state capitol, he was greeted like the rock star that he is. The size of his contributions were only outmatched by the size of his heart. Colleges and students across the state owe him a debt of gratitude.

—Mary Beth Labate, Former President, Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities

Father McShane is a much respected and appreciated leader, clearly committed to higher education and the intellectual apostolate. He and I have been friends for more than 40 years, and I have always found him to be compassionate, insightful, and dedicated. On many occasions, I and others have enjoyed his gift for enlivening meetings with telling observations and wit, and I know that people greatly enjoy his company.

Thanks to Father McShane’s effort, Fordham is a better, stronger academic institution, more able to meet challenges and opportunities. His impact has been immense, evident to anyone walking on the Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses. While I regret that he will be stepping down as Fordham’s president in summer 2022, I know that he will continue making significant contributions as a faithful Jesuit priest and educator wherever he is in the future.

—William P. Leahy, S.J., President, Boston College

Father Joe McShane has led Fordham University with energy, purpose, and grace for nearly two decades. Thanks to his leadership, Fordham is an academically stronger, more vibrant, and more influential university than ever before. At the same time, he has been an important and highly respected voice in discussions nationally about the role and place of colleges and universities in the 21st century. Across the diverse landscape of American higher education, all of us who were lucky to work with him and benefit from his wise counsel are grateful and will miss his insightful and thoughtful help. Thanks, Joe.

—Ted Mitchell, President, American Council on Education

Under Father McShane’s outstanding leadership, Fordham has transformed itself from a well-regarded regional institution into a distinguished, nationally and internationally recognized university.

—Armando Nuñez Jr., GABELLI ’82, Vice Chair, Fordham University Board of Trustees; Advisor and Former CEO, Global Distribution Group, Viacom CBS

As Father McShane approaches retirement from his current position, I am honored to express the admiration and gratitude of his brother Jesuits. I can testify to the deep love for and commitment to Fordham that have marked Father McShane’s 25 years of service to the University, six as dean of Fordham College and 19 as president. In the future, as a loyal son of Saint Ignatius Loyola, he will bring his depth of experience and dedication to new ministerial assignments after a well-deserved break.

—Joseph M. O’Keefe, S.J., GSAS ’81, Provincial, USA East Province of the Society of Jesus

I vividly recall driving out to Scranton with fellow board member and Presidential Search Committee member Pat Nazemetz to interview Father McShane. He gave us a tour of the Scranton University campus. Everyone we passed greeted him with a broad smile. It was clear he was deeply admired and that he felt very comfortable chatting with the students.

We had a very pleasant lunch at a local golf club. Father McShane’s deep love and knowledge of Fordham was palpable. Pat and I had a sense that he was clearly the person who could enthusiastically build on what Father Joe O’Hare had accomplished and take Fordham to new heights. When Pat and I reported to the search committee, they were thrilled to hear how enthusiastic Father McShane was about the possibility of being Father O’Hare’s successor. He did not disappoint us.

Father McShane’s many bold initiatives over his long tenure have made Fordham a first-class world university. He leaves behind a legacy that will ensure Fordham will continue to be a world-class Jesuit university.

Thank you, Father McShane.

—Joseph P. Parkes, S.J., JES ’68, Provincial Assistant for Secondary and Pre-Secondary Education, USA East Province of the Society of Jesus; Former Fordham University Trustee; and Former President, Cristo Rey New York High School

When the history of Fordham University in our time is written, the tenure of Father McShane will stand out for its excellence. Fordham’s unprecedented growth as one of the premier universities not just in our region, not just in our nation, but in the entire world was meteoric and no accident, the result of meticulous planning and cultivation. The Fordham community has become a beacon almost unmatched in scholarship, teaching, and culture under Father McShane’s steady hand. So while I am sad to lose Father McShane’s leadership of our Fordham, I am excited for the future of our great institution. That future was paved by the guidance of Father Joseph M. McShane.

—U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., FCRH ’59, GSAS ’61

You have done an amazing job advancing the University and are an enthusiastic and eloquent advocate for all that Fordham does and all for which it stands. It is hard to think of either you or Fordham without the other.

While your list of accomplishments at Fordham is long and worthy of great praise, so too are the many things you have done outside of Fordham itself. In the organizations in which we have overlapped (AJCU, CICU, and A-10, among them), all have benefited from the substantial impact you have on decisions and direction. You always provide wise, values-based insights and compelling arguments, grounded in a passion to make things better. And Jesuit higher education overall has benefited enormously from your advocacy.

Further, I have always admired your ability to connect with so many and do so with such genuine concern and sincerity. You are generous with your time and supportive of fellow travelers.

I can sense your modesty deflecting this and much of the other well-deserved accolades you are receiving. You have made a difference, Joe, a big difference, and done so across many realms. You have done the Lord’s work well and I pray that you have many more years to continue to do so.

—Fred P. Pestello, Ph.D., President, Saint Louis University

Father McShane has been an incredible leader and Fordham has become a new and better institution under his leadership. He leaves a legacy of excellence, integrity, and perseverance not just with the Fordham family but with the broader community, all guided by his faith and an unwavering commitment to helping his fellow man and woman achieve their God-given gifts. He is a giant in academia who leaves behind big shoes to fill.

—Valerie Rainford, FCRH ’86, Fordham University Trustee; CEO, Elloree Talent Strategies

As a loyal member of the Fordham family for over 60 years (four degrees), I have had the privilege of observing closely our university’s arc of development. There is no doubt that the McShane years have been transformative, establishing the Jesuit university of New York City as a magnet for talent from around our country and the world, thereby creating a contemporary manifestation of the core values of Jesuit education. And even as Father Joe led our University to this new version of itself, he became a champion of those values to all in higher education and a universally admired role model for those of us who devote our lives to improving education generally. I (we all) will miss his voice in our daily conversations; but, believe me, we will turn to him regularly for advice.

—John Sexton, FCRH ’63, GSAS ’65, ’78, President Emeritus, New York University

Fordham is synonymous with Father Joe, and so is higher education in New York more broadly. You have been such an important presence and voice in this work, and such an inviting and generous colleague to me as I have come into this sector and this state. I am sad for all of us that you are moving on to your next chapter but, of course, happy for you as you embark on whatever it is that is next for you.

—Laura Sparks, President, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art

Father McShane has an incredible legacy of accomplishments during his years as president at Fordham University. I cannot imagine a finer leader during his tenure—the personification of the ideal Jesuit, a superb scholar, and a true New Yorker. Whether measured by student applications and graduations, growth of the endowment, or the cultivation of Fordham’s presence in New York, what Father McShane has done is extraordinary and a source of pride for us all. He will leave Fordham in a very strong position for continuing its mission for our students in the future.

—Edward M. Stroz, GABELLI ’79, Fordham University Trustee; Co-Founder and Retired Executive Chairman, Stroz Friedberg LLC

“I love Father Joseph McShane. While I am so happy that he will be moving on to this next, happy phase in his life, I know Fordham is losing an exemplary leader who has led us to new heights. Father O’Hare was a hard act to follow, but Father McShane has exceeded our expectations. We thank him for dedicating his life to God and all of us. On behalf of my family, myself, and the wider community, we have all benefited from his wisdom, his humor, his intellect, his work, his love, and his guidance. I wish my friend the very best. Let us all try and emulate our leader Father Joseph McShane, and to truly thank him, let us recommit ourselves Ad majorem Dei gloriam!”

—U.S. Rep. Thomas Suozzi, LAW ’89, PAR ’17

It is difficult to sum up the profound impact that Father McShane’s leadership and character have had on Fordham over the years. Suffice it to say that he has worked tirelessly and effectively to drive Fordham’s rise to ever-greater prominence, and ensure that it remains a special, welcoming place: elite without being elitist, and faithful to its mission of educating students of distinction who will make a difference in the world.

—John N. Tognino, PCS ’75, Former Chair, Fordham University Board of Trustees; Chairman and CEO, Pepper Financial Group

As Father McShane moves on from his longtime post as president of Fordham University, we can reflect on the tremendous contribution he made for students and alumni like myself. He had an innate ability to inspire students, staff, and faculty toward Jesuit principles—to better ourselves, and at the same time, be men and women for others, especially the poor. For this and his unwavering commitment to the Fordham community, we thank him for his work and service. His influence will continue to be felt beyond the university, and wherever God sends him next.

—U.S. Rep. Juan Vargas, GSAS ’87

A man answered the knock at the door. The agents didn’t know that this was their suspect. After a tense exchange with the agents, he pulled out a revolver and shot and killed two of them, Anthony Palmisano and Edwin Woodriffe, GABELLI ’62. He fled the apartment through a window, and city police and FBI agents captured him a few hours later. The murder of the two agents still resonates. Both were under 30, part of a tight-knit cohort of young agents in the FBI’s Washington field office, some of whom vividly recall the events of that day, January 8, 1969. And the killings were shocking for another reason. Woodriffe, 27 at the time, became the first black FBI agent to die in the line of duty.

For burial, he was brought back to his native Brooklyn, back to the city he loved, where he had worked his way through Fordham before launching his career in government service.

This April, the story of the earnest, witty agent who died too soon came back into the spotlight as the city honored him by making his name a fixture on the urban landscape. In a well-attended ceremony on a Brooklyn street corner, in the heart of the neighborhood where Woodriffe grew up, his immediate family spoke in remembrance of a radiant young man whose spirit seemed, somehow, to be present still.

A Child of Immigrants

Like so many New York stories, Edwin R. Woodriffe’s begins with immigration—his parents came to America from Trinidad when they were either in their teens or barely out of them, said Woodriffe’s daughter,  Lee Woodriffe, of Lithonia, Georgia. They  ran  a  dry  cleaning  shop   in the struggling Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, getting up early every day—“no time off, no sick days, no nothing”—and instilling  a  strong work ethic in their children, she said.

The youngest of three boys, Woodriffe helped out at the dry cleaner’s after school and doted on his parents, Lee Woodriffe said. He was an altar boy at nearby St. Peter Claver Church, where he met his future wife, Ella Louise Moore, during Christian confraternity classes.

After graduating from Brooklyn Preparatory School, he earned a degree in accounting at Fordham’s City Hall Division at 302 Broadway, where he was vice president of the philosophy club. He paid his  way by working as a police cadet and as an elevator operator at Macy’s, his daughter said. Upon graduation, he and  Ella were married, and they had two children, Lee and her brother,  Edwin Woodriffe Jr. Lee was only 5 when her father was killed, but learned from others what he was like. He was a jazz lover who would sometimes play his saxophone on the roof of the building where the family lived, she said. A voracious reader interested in religion and philosophy, he was a deep thinker, which was apparent from his conversation and his humor, she said.

The idea of working in law enforcement had taken hold when he was young; he admired his older brother for being a New York City police officer. After working for the Treasury Department in enforcement, he joined the FBI in 1966. Sometimes he would sign letters “Eliot Ness,” Lee said, describing her father as “really good-natured, and just always cracking a joke.”

In the FBI’s Washington, D.C., field office, he was low-key and decisive, “a very classy individual” who was courteous toward crime suspects, said Ed Armento, a retired agent who trained under Woodriffe for a week.

Lee Woodriffe said her father was one of only a handful of black FBI agents. Retired agent Robert Quigley, GABELLI ’62, recalled working with three black agents besides  Woodriffe in the Washington field office. Given Woodriffe’s talents, “there is no doubt in my mind that [he]would’ve been one of the top FBI executives had he lived,” Quigley said.

He recalled a story of solidarity against racism that  was  told  to  him: When Woodriffe was an FBI trainee in Washington, D.C., he and his classmates went to suburban Maryland to rent apartments, but they all pulled out of a pending housing contract when told Woodriffe would be barred. “The other agents were aghast,” Quigley said, so they sought housing elsewhere.

A Tragic Day

Quigley remembers the day when agents learned of a bank robbery by Billie Austin Bryant, an escaped federal prisoner. Woodriffe, Palmisano, and another agent went to the apartment where they had heard  Bryant’s  wife or girlfriend lived, said  Quigley,  citing reports  prepared  afterward. The agents couldn’t have known it was Bryant who opened the door when they knocked—“They have no photograph, no idea what he looks like,” Quigley said. “Back in those days, all we had were radios in the car. There was no way to send a photo.”

Bryant told the agents the woman they were seeking wasn’t there. When they asked to come in and wait for her, he refused and started to close the door. Woodriffe put his foot in the door to stop him, and Bryant pulled out his revolver. Woodriffe and Palmisano never got a chance to pull their firearms, said retired agent Charles Harvey, who tried to revive the two agents soon after.

Bryant surrendered to a police detective six hours later, after being tracked down to an attic in a building where someone had reported noise, said Quigley, who was there when Bryant was captured. Bryant was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences with no chance of parole.

The 50th anniversary of the two agents’ deaths was commemorated  in Washington in January by the bureau’s Washington field office and the Society of Former Agents of the FBI. Harvey spoke at the event. “Our job is to never forget,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, another remembrance had taken root.

A Street Renamed

St. Peter Claver Church sits at the intersection of Jefferson Avenue and Claver Place in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Lee Woodriffe spearheaded the two- year effort to have the City Council co-name the segment of Jefferson Avenue starting  at  that  intersection  in honor of her father, hoping to keep him present in a part of the city that was important in his life, she said.

“I did not want his final resting place in people’s minds to be in Cypress Hills Cemetery,” she said. “It’s very important to me that [his story]come full circle, but come full circle in the right way.”

The co-naming sends an inspiring message, she said. “Here is somebody who came from an impoverished area, odds stacked against him, but through perseverance and diligence and having integrity and wanting to do  better, rose up through the ranks and really made something of himself. It’s a story of hope, and what you can become.”

On April 26, FBI Special Agent Edwin R. Woodriffe Way was formally christened in a ceremony attended by FBI agents, New York City police,  city  officials,  clergy,  and  friends   and members of Woodriffe’s family, including his widow, Ella Woodriffe.

“There’s a saying that hatred corrodes the vessel it’s carried in, but today I  have  no  hatred,”  she  said.  “I speak with heart-filled joy and thanking God for allowing all of us to be here in attendance as a testament to my husband’s memory.

“His  story  began  right  here   at  St. Peter Claver Church,” she said. “Edwin went to school here. He went to church here. He was an altar boy here. We met as teenagers  here.  …  We were married here, we had two children, and lastly, he was funeralized here. He will be forever remembered in our hearts.”

Edwin R. Woodriffe Jr., who was 6 when his father died, lacks vivid memories of him. “There are photos and stories from friends and family, but the nuances are lost,” he said at the ceremony. “What was his favorite color? I don’t know. I have one of his high school essays on basketball. Were the Knicks his favorite team? I don’t know, and if I did, I don’t remember.

“But he got a B+, by the way, on the paper,” he said, to laughter.

“The thing I  remember  most  is the idea of  him  represented  inside  the family,” said Woodriffe, whose mother got help from extended family in raising him and Lee. “I feel blessed that my father’s sacrifice was a part  of inspiring my sister and I to be the adults that we are today. And on the 50th anniversary of his passing, I’m honored to see his name on this corner, where his story can continue.”

Auxiliary Bishop James Massa of the Diocese of Brooklyn also spoke at the ceremony. He said the newly unveiled street sign is a reminder “that a great New Yorker once lived among us and overcame racial barriers in order to serve, in order to protect the vulnerable and contribute to the common good of our nation.”