As U.S. Special Envoy to Northern Ireland for Economic Affairs, Kennedy is working to promote peace, prosperity, and stability throughout the region. Before assuming this role in 2022, he was a four-term member of Congress who represented the 4th Congressional District in his home state of Massachusetts.

He is also a grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, who once famously urged Fordham graduates to be agents of good in a world “aflame with the desires and hatreds of multitudes” during his own commencement address at the University, in 1967, when he was a U.S. senator from New York.

“I’m excited and grateful that we’ll be hearing from Joe Kennedy as we celebrate our graduates on May 18,” said Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham University. “His work in Northern Ireland points to an important truth about our bitterly divided times. The process of achieving peace and stability in this region offers hope for defusing even the most intractable conflicts, and we commend him for his efforts to sustain this progress.”

Tetlow noted how Kennedy’s career echoes the intentions behind the founding of Fordham. Archbishop John Hughes—who was Irish American, like the Kennedy family—established Fordham in 1841 as part of his efforts to create opportunity for struggling immigrants from the Emerald Isle. “The experience of the Irish, in their homeland and in America, has special resonance for us at Fordham,” she said.

A Career of Service

Kennedy graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School, spent two years in the Peace Corps, and worked as an Assistant District Attorney in Massachusetts before winning election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012. In Congress, Kennedy “built an impressive legislative record around economic policy, health care, and civil rights,” according to the U.S. State Department website. 

Kennedy also serves as President of the nonprofit Citizens Energy, which meets low-income families’ energy needs, and is the founder of Groundwork Project, an advocacy group that supports community organizing in historically disenfranchised areas. He is a board member of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute, Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, Harvard Institute of Politics, and the Massachusetts Association of Mental Health.

On May 18, he will become the fifth Kennedy to receive an honorary degree from Fordham. His grandfather received one in 1961, when he was U.S. Attorney General, six years before giving his commencement address. His great-uncle John F. Kennedy received an honorary degree at a Fordham Law Alumni Association luncheon in 1958 as a U.S. senator, two years before being elected president of the United States. His great-uncle Ted Kennedy, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, received an honorary degree and delivered the commencement address in June 1969. And his great-aunt Jean Kennedy Smith, U.S. ambassador to Ireland from 1993 to 1998, received an honorary degree at Fordham’s commencement in 1995, when the speaker was Mary Robinson, president of Ireland at the time.

Two other members of the Kennedy family received honorary doctorates from Fordham and delivered a commencement address at Rose Hill: Special Olympics chairman Timothy Shriver, Ph.D., in 2019, and his father, Sargent Shriver, the first leader of the Peace Corps, in 1963.

In announcing Joe Kennedy’s appointment as U.S. Special Envoy, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony J. Blinken noted the United States’ commitment to supporting “the peace dividends of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement,” referring to the 1998 accords that largely ended the political violence in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles.  

“Joe has dedicated his career to public service,” and “he will draw from his extensive experience to support economic growth in Northern Ireland and to deepen U.S. engagement with all communities,” Blinken said.

The 2017 departure of the United Kingdom—which includes Northern Ireland—from the European Union has led to trade and border disputes with the Irish Republic, as well as calls for reunification of Ireland. 

Speaking last year in Belfast, Northern Ireland, at a conference marking the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, Kennedy noted the importance of overcoming divisions and building shared prosperity. 

“If there’s a place on this planet that is resilient, that is capable, that is clear-eyed and scrappy enough to take on this challenge, it is the shores we stand on today,” he said. “You have wrestled through hundreds of years of division, tribe and tradition, country and creed, pain, hurt, and loss, and you are still here. You are building a Northern Ireland where the troubles of the past give way to the triumphs of tomorrow.”

A Bridge to Justice: The Life of Franklin H. Williams

People tend to view 20th-century civil rights heroes through a “sepia lens,” Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, once said. But those leaders were not “superpeople deposited from some other planet.” They were “ordinary people of extraordinary intellect” and courage who still have the power to show us how to create “a true democracy.” Ifill was speaking at a 2018 Fordham Law School event celebrating the legacy of civil rights attorney and diplomat Franklin H. Williams, LAW ’45.

In A Bridge to Justice, Enid Gort and John M. Caher recount Williams’ “profound impact on the (still unfinished) struggle for equal rights.” Born in New York City in 1917, he attended Lincoln University, the nation’s first degree-granting historically Black university, before enrolling at Fordham Law School in 1941. Service in the segregated U.S. Army interrupted his legal studies and “scarred Williams,” the authors write, but he earned his law degree in 1945 and soon joined the NAACP.

For the next 14 years, he worked on seminal civil liberties cases that overturned racially restrictive housing covenants and school segregation. And he often put his life on the line, once barely escaping a lynch mob in Florida, where he defended three Black youths falsely accused of rape. He went on to help organize the Peace Corps; serve as ambassador to Ghana; lead a nonprofit dedicated to advancing educational opportunity for Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans; and chair a New York state judicial commission, now named in his honor, that works to promote racial and ethnic fairness in the courts. Williams died in 1990, but his life story, the authors write, “is an object lesson for those with the courage and fortitude to … help this nation heal and advance through unity rather than tribalism.”

Cross Bronx: A Writing Life

“The most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories,” Peter Quinn, GSAS ’75, told this magazine in 2017. For more than four decades, the Bronx native has been a remarkably accomplished storyteller—as a novelist, chief speechwriter for New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and witty, humane chronicler of New York City and the Irish American experience. In the past two years, Fordham University Press has reissued four of his novels, including Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which earned Quinn a 1995 American Book Award; and an essay collection, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007). Now comes this delightfully funny and frank memoir of his Catholic upbringing, his enduring affinity for his native borough (“I don’t live in the Bronx anymore, but I’ll never leave”), and the circuitous, consequential path of his writing life. His journey took him from Fordham grad student to chief speechwriter for two New York governors and corporate scribe for “five successive chairmen of the shapeshifting, ever-inflating, now-imploded Time Inc./Time Warner/AOL Time Warner,” a chapter of his memoir he cheekily calls “Killing Time.” He also writes of meeting and courting his wife, Kathy, of the “intense joy and satisfaction of fatherhood,” and of coming to terms with his own emotionally distant father. “Looking back, what I’m struck by most is luck,” he writes. “What I feel most is gratitude.”

South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City

For nearly 40 years, Jill Jonnes has been among the most persistent chroniclers of the Bronx, giving eloquent voice to the citizen activists who have driven its revival. In 1986, when she published the first edition of South Bronx Rising, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment. “Today,” she writes in the third edition of the book, “we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying [Bronx] neighborhoods.”

The revival began with “local activists and the social justice Catholics … mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.” Countless Fordham students, faculty, and alumni have contributed to this movement, helping to establish and sustain groups including the Bronx River Alliance and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. It’s not all roses: The South Bronx remains part of the country’s poorest urban congressional district; the “calamity of COVID” hit communities hard; and gentrification threatens to undo hard-fought progress. But Jonnes provides ample reason to celebrate and continue the work.

“We Fordham students have a privilege and also a responsibility to work with community-based organizations to help make the Bronx a better place—and that’s true of any community you live in,” said Medeiros.

Nutrition and Affordable Housing for Families

When Ellie Bauer walks across the commencement stage this spring, she’ll have earned two master’s degrees: one in economics and another in international political economy and development (IPED).

In 2020, she entered Fordham as a Peace Corps Coverdell Fellow, a fellowship for recently returned Peace Corps volunteers. She had volunteered in Ethiopia, where she taught nutrition classes to middle school students and helped families reach their nutritional goals. As part of her fellowship at Fordham, she served as a volunteer coordinator at the University Neighborhood Housing Program (UNHP), a nonprofit that creates and improves affordable housing for residents in the Northwest Bronx. Over the past two years, she managed volunteers and interns and helped clients complete their affordable housing applications. She also worked with a team to implement a new virtual tax assistance program for low-income residents. 

“I grew up in a town of 2,000 people, where we all knew each other and shared a certain culture. Moving somewhere for a job or school provides you with a different community to live with, and it’s important to learn more about that community,” Bauer said.  

Thanks to her Presidential Management Fellowship—a program that matches outstanding graduate students with federal opportunities—she will move to Chicago and become a program specialist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, where she will support WIC, a supplemental nutrition program for low- to middle-income families.

Bauer said she is grateful for her mentors in Fordham’s IPED program, who ensured that Bauer and her classmates got to know each other during the pandemic and secured funding for their unpaid internships and language training. 

“I feel very lucky to have found the IPED program and the directors who make it so great,” she said. 

Listening to Men Experiencing Homelessness

Benjamin Medeiros is graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Fordham College at Rose Hill. In his first year at Fordham, he tutored elementary students and tended to a community garden in the Bronx. Over the past year, he has worked to dismantle stereotypes about the homeless population with his classmates through Fordham’s Engaged Leaders Fellowship, offered by the Center for Community Engaged Learning. His team interviewed men living at a Manhattan shelter about their lives and surveyed more than 100 Fordham students about their perceptions of the homeless community. 

At the end of May, he will fly to Mississippi through Global Outreach, a Fordham service and cultural immersion program. For one week, Medeiros will serve as a counselor at a sleepaway camp for foster children from low-income backgrounds. This fall, he will return to Fordham to pursue his Ph.D. in counseling psychology. 

“Being a counseling psychologist is essentially being a community-engaged learner. You interact with a community and learn from the people that you work with,” said Medeiros, who hopes to someday counsel clients at a correctional facility in New York. 

“My experiences at Fordham have taught me how to appreciate the people in the larger community, especially in marginalized corners of that community,” said Medeiros, “and how to use my skill set and voice to make that community better.”

“Fordham students have a passion for leadership and understand the academic underpinnings of societal issues. That passion gets ignited in the classroom and continues with civic engagement in the Bronx, Manhattan, and beyond,” said Arto Woodley, Ed.D., executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning. “As [Irish poet William Butler] Yeats said, ‘Education is not the filling of a pail, but a lighting of a fire.’”

All volunteers bring individual expertise to their respective organizations, but Fordham College at Rose Hill seniors Marc De La Hoz and Laura Lynch said Fordham students bring something extra: a commitment to service, honed over their four years here.

De La Hoz is heading to Cameroon with the Peace Corps as a health educator. Lynch will assist teachers at underserved community schools outside of Sacramento, California, with the JVC, one of the world’s largest lay, Catholic, full-time volunteer programs. Both say they are going away to learn, as well as to help.

Lynch said her experiences in Alaska and Mississippi with Fordham’s Global Outreach, part of the Center for Community Engaged Learning, taught her a lot about how to approach helping others. At the forefront is self-awareness of her own privilege.

“When you’re working with marginalized communities, or any kind of service work, you have to be careful not to be paternalistic,” said Lynch, adding that the people she’ll be aiming to help will have plenty to teach her.

The French major said she’ll be brushing up on her Spanish over the summer before beginning her one-year stint as a teacher’s assistant at Saint Hope Charter Schools in Sacramento, a city known more for its wealth than its underserved communities.

“Everyone talks about how nice a city it is, but there’s shocking disparity, so historically underserved populations don’t benefit from that reputation,” she said, adding that it’s not unlike her experiences volunteering in the Bronx, where impoverished communities sit amidst New York’s enormous wealth.

Lynch has some experience in teaching; while at Fordham, she volunteered as a tutor at Concourse House, a transitional housing site, and at the Rose Hill Tutoring Center.

She said she’s looking forward to the JVC version of volunteering, which incorporates Ignatian values signified by four pillars: simple living, social justice, community, and spirituality. To that end, she’ll be living in a community with other JVC volunteers on a small stipend, where she’ll share dinners and experiences. Mostly, she’s looking forward to meeting her new students.

“I want to stand with these students and hear about their experience,” she said. “This is for me as much a learning experience as another year of school would be.”

De La Hoz also expressed a desire to learn from the people of Cameroon over the next two years. He’s already hunkered down on reading about the diverse country, which tends to “lean very religious and conservative,” he said, regardless of the many religions represented there. He said he’s expecting to embark on a period of listening to understand what’s needed from him. He spent years teaching sexual health as a volunteer at Peer Health Exchange in New York City, a health education program for underserved community youth. He used what he learned at Peer Health to help educate a diverse group of populations about sexual health, from sex workers in the Dominican Republic to teens at his church near his hometown of Fishkill, New York.

Each community has its own needs and each has its own way of receiving health information, he said. Bronx teens appreciate frankness, he said, “or they immediately lose interest.”

“With a sex worker, the situation is very different. In that case, it’s sitting there and letting them know you are listening to them as a person, not a sex object,” he said.

In Cameroon, he’ll need to learn the needs of a new population: those living with HIV/AIDS. He will not be dealing with clients as directly as in the past. The Peace Corps, established in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy with Sargent Shriver serving as its first director, has its members work side by side with local leaders to tackle challenges.

He said his experience working with immigrants in his own community laid bare what happens when people don’t get the health information they need.

“Health education is what decides success in life,” he said. “If you’re a 14-year-old girl without real health education, you could get pregnant. A baby is a blessing, but what about that young girl’s future?”

De La Hoz’s ultimate goal will be medical school when he returns from Cameroon. For now, he’s set to listen.

“I won’t know the best way to get things done until I get there.”

“Fordham University is proud to confer an honorary doctorate upon Timothy Shriver,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University. “If Fordham were only considering Dr. Shriver’s many accomplishments in education, childhood development, and special athletics, they would be more than enough to merit the honor. In conferring this degree, however, we also acknowledge a man who could have chosen any path in life but elected to devote himself to the welfare of society’s most vulnerable members. In this, Dr. Shriver exemplifies the highest of Fordham’s ideals and the best in all of us.”

An educator, author, and activist for social change, Shriver has spent his career working for the dignity and fulfillment of young people. In 1996, he joined the Special Olympics, founded by his mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, when he was a child. Under his leadership, it has become a beloved global organization that promotes health and education through sports, supporting more than 5 million athletes with physical and developmental disabilities who take part in over 100,000 annual competitions.

Earlier in his career, Shriver worked as a teacher in the New Haven, Connecticut, public schools, where he helped establish social and emotional education programs in an area plagued by violence and drugs. During a visit to Fordham in 2016, he talked about the importance of mindfulness at a time when so many young people are facing anxiety and depression.

“The silence that has come to us from contemplative practice can be . . . a source of direct experience of one’s goodness,” he said.

“The primary vector of discovery is of your own self-judgment. And when you finally start to unmask your own judgment, you get to the point where you can see a little more clearly.”

Shriver was a producer on four films including the 1997 Steven Spielberg film Amistad. His 2014 book, Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most, recounts his personal spiritual journey and vision of inclusivity.

Through its own commitment to service and education, Fordham shares many connections to Shriver and his family. The University ranks among schools that produce the most volunteers for the Peace Corps, originally led by his father, Sargent Shriver, who received an honorary doctorate at Fordham’s 1963 commencement. His son Tim has served as president of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where many Fordham students volunteer after graduation. And his daughter Caroline graduates this May as a member of the Fordham College at Lincoln Center Class of 2019 with an Ailey/Fordham B.F.A. in dance.

Six other notable figures will receive honorary degrees at commencement. Fordham will grant a doctorate of humane letters to Ellen R. Alemany, chairwoman and CEO of CIT Group and CEO of CIT Bank, N.A.; Bob Casey, U.S. senator from Pennsylvania; Yueh C. Chen, secretary of the J. T. Tai & Company Foundation; Joseph P. Parkes, S.J., provincial assistant for secondary and pre-secondary education for the Maryland and USA Northeast Provinces of the Society of Jesus and a former Fordham trustee; and David Ushery, NBC News 4 New York news anchor and reporter. Alemany will be the speaker at the diploma ceremony for Gabelli School of Business master’s degree candidates on May 20. The Honorable Pamela K. Chen, United States District Court judge for the Eastern District of New York, will receive an honorary doctorate of laws and will speak at Fordham Law School’s diploma ceremony on May 20.

This year Fordham came in at No. 20 among medium-sized universities (schools with between 5,000 and 15,000 enrolled students). There are currently 17 Fordham alumni serving worldwide.

According to the Peace Corps, alumni from more than 3,000 colleges and universities nationwide have served in the Peace Corps since its founding in 1961, including 452 Fordham alumni.

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Read about how Sargent Shriver, founding director of the Peace Corps, once visited Fordham.
Discover how one Fordham couple went from Pugsley’s to the Peace Corps. 

Camille Tacastacas, Veronica Muoio, and Josh Voges—all of whom graduated from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences on May 21—are among approximately 25 fellows selected from hundreds of applicants for the yearlong program. Tacastacas and Voges have both been offered fellowship positions in Malawi and Rwanda, respectively. Muoio’s placement is pending.

The global fellowships typically lead to full-time positions within CRS.

“This experience is helping me expand my world,” said Tacastacas, a native of the Philippines who currently is interning with CRS in Sierra Leone. “Sierra Leone is the first place I’ve worked outside of the Philippines or the United States, so I came in with certain notions of how people are.

“This has been an exercise in shattering those labels and taking people just as they are, giving them a chance to express their whole personhood and humanity.”

In Sierra Leone, Tacastacas has been doing operations research for a project that addresses acute malnutrition in young children. A graduate of the Jesuit Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, Tacastacas also served as a member of Jesuit Volunteer Corps prior to her Sierra Leone placement.

In Malawi, she will do research for Ubale (United in Building and Advancing Life Expectations), a USAID-funded project on food security and nutrition.

“The Jesuits at Ateneo de Manila inculcated in me the value for social justice,” she said. “That exposure to the least, the less, and the lonely made me want to marry my life’s work with the needs of the world.”

Voges, who is completing a CRS internship in Senegal, is a former Peace Corps volunteer who said he learned the value of economic development when was stationed in Morocco. Recently, he received a message from a basket weaver celebrating the economic success of a workshop that he, Voges, and and other villagers had built.

“He said he was spending the weekend at the beach with his family and friends celebrating, because they had been able to produce and sell a record number of baskets last summer,” said Voges. “He said they used the increase in revenue to purchase a truck so that the artisans would no longer have to pay each week to have the merchandise delivered to the markets.”

In Senegal, Voges has been designing an emergency behavior change intervention in Cape Verde in response to the Zika epidemic. He also coordinated a proposal for a $1.5 million USAID grant to support peace and reconciliation efforts in southern Senegal.

In Rwanda, he will work with CRS to develop community-based models to strengthen local agriculture, nutrition, and economies.

Helping local communities become self-sustaining is at the heart of the CRS mission, said Muoio.

A former Peace Corps volunteer, Muoio said, “The most rewarding part of the work was seeing our students and participants in the programs get really engaged and then go and launch programs and projects of their own—taking what we were doing in our center and bringing it out to the community to share with others.”

Muoio is an intern at the United Nations Development Programme, where she is working on issues related to gender equality around the world. Her CRS fellowship placement is pending, but she said it is likely she will work with Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the Middle East.

“Working with local partners is what CRS does best,” she said. “And they set a standard for other organizations—because the ideal in the industry to is to work yourself out of a job.”

Take, for example, Joannah Caneda, FCRH ’06, LAW ’14, and Rob Gunther, FCRH ’06, who met at Rose Hill early their freshmen year, when Joannah offered Rob a slice of a Pugsley pie. He said yes. “It was a no-brainer!” he exclaims. And so was their relationship.

“I think as best as two 18 year olds can figure things out, we were just certain,” Rob says. “It was something that was just happening every day. It happened strong. It happened fast. And it continues to the present day.”

After the shared slice, they started dating and attended the President’s Ball together in October. “We made it official in McGinley,” says Joannah, citing the original location of the annual extravaganza. Similar interests fueled the connection. They both grew up on Long Island (although Joannah was born in the Philippines), and they each double majored in history and American studies. They worked on The Ram and at the Ram Van together (he was a driver; she worked in the office). They also participated in the Global Outreach program. It was their separate trips—his to Tijuana, hers to Mississippi—that got them interested in joining the Peace Corps together.

“Fordham’s mission of service and the service trips at the school planted the seed,” Rob says. “My worldview broadened.”

After graduating, they started the lengthy Peace Corps application process. At that time, couples who wanted to be stationed together had to be married for at least six months. So they wed in a civil ceremony in November 2008, followed by a church ceremony in May 2009. A few weeks later, they were on a plane to Ecuador.

They were placed in a remote town 10 hours outside of Quito, where running water, electricity, and internet service were sporadic. “We relied on each other for a lot,” Joannah says. “The work-life balance is different in the Peace Corps because your work is your life, but … it was basically a two-year-long honeymoon!”

Among their Peace Corps projects, Joannah focused on child-maternal health, speaking in schools and the community about topics like diet and hygiene; Rob taught community members how to build eco-friendly toilets that could transform waste into compost.

Joannah took the LSATs in Quito so she could begin law school at Fordham when they returned in fall 2011. She’s now an associate at O’Melveny & Myers. Rob is working on his MFA in fiction at Queens College at night and caring for their 14-month-old son, Robert Joseph Gunther IV (aka Robbie), during the day. They’re looking forward to returning to Fordham to celebrate their 10th reunion during Jubilee weekend, June 3 to 5—and maybe even introducing Robbie to the pizza that started it all.

“I feel so grateful to have had the opportunity to go to Fordham. And to meet Rob,” Joannah says. “It led me on the path to the rest of my life.”

—Maja Tarateta

The Peace Corps recognized these colleges and universities on Feb. 18. With 15 alumni volunteering worldwide, Fordham comes in at No. 18 out of 25 on the list of medium-size universities (between 5,000 to 15,000 enrolled).

Other Jesuit universities that shared the list with Fordham are Georgetown, at No. 7, and Boston College, at No. 20.

Alumni from more than 3,000 colleges and universities nationwide have served in the Peace Corps since its founding in 1961, including 446 Fordham alumni. According to the Peace Corps site, the New York City metropolitan area is the top-producing area in the country, with 349 residents in overseas service.

View the complete 2016 rankings of the top 25 schools in each undergraduate category here.

“We are in a struggle,” he said. “The traditional, ordinary, pedestrian way of doing things has got to be junked.”

While it’s impossible to know how many Fordham students Sargent inspired that day, or on subsequent visits, his words did make a lasting impression on at least one. Ann Sheehan, UGE ’65, executive director of Pennsylvania’s BCTV and a former Peace Corp volunteer, applied for the program immediately after Shriver’s address.

She posted about Shriver’s visit to Rose Hill on her station’s blog, two days after Shriver died at the age of 95.

“The idea of the Peace Corps had intrigued me since it was first talked about, and although I don’t remember anything specific that he said, Sarge hooked me completely. There were applications available right there, in the gym, and I made my friend wait for me while I filled it out, never dreaming that I would be accepted.”

As director of the Peace Corps, Shriver capitalized on the new and exciting spirit of volunteerism President Kennedy inspired in the nation, especially its younger citizens. Within a few years, thousands of young Americans were working in poor countries around the world.

Shriver’s Rose Hill appearance was part of the University’s American Age Lecture Series, which strives to embody the spirit of the Fordham community through programs that educate, stimulate and enhance the college experience.