The editors of Commonweal, an acclaimed journal of religion, politics, and culture, said they chose to honor Tetlow because of her trailblazing lay leadership and commitment to justice.

“Her attention to forming and informing the next generation of Catholics and all people of goodwill, and her spirit of knowledge-seeking and creativity exemplify the values Commonweal continues to embody,” they said. 

For Tetlow, receiving an award from the renowned publication was an honor. “Commonweal embodies the best of the Catholic intellectual tradition, asking the critical questions, pushing on assumptions, seeking truth for a century,” she said. It “continues to lovingly push our church to read the signs of the times and to keep striving towards the truth of the Gospel.” 

Tetlow is the first woman and the first layperson to lead Fordham, and according to Commonweal editor Dominic Preziosi, that’s part of what made her an ideal candidate for the Centennial Award.

“She’s an inspiring example who really aligns with Commonweal’s mission, and our belief in the importance of laypeople in matters of faith and leadership,” said Preziosi, a Fordham alumnus. He said Tetlow, who recently appeared on the Commonweal podcast, is “the perfect expression of the kind of community we’re building around as we launch into our second century.”

Fordham Board Chair Armando Nuñez and Kim Bepler, a Fordham trustee, were co-chairs of the dinner. “Tania is a gifted and charismatic leader who is both entrepreneurial and a fierce advocate for Fordham and Jesuit traditions,” said Nuñez. “As president, she is a faith-first leader, called to the service of the University community every day.”

Several other friends of Fordham were on hand for the ceremony. Timothy Shriver, the disability rights activist, presented Tetlow with the award. Shriver received an honorary degree from Fordham in 2019 and delivered the keynote address at that year’s commencement.

Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J, professor emerita of theology at Fordham and an award-winning author, delivered the invocation and touched on Tetlow’s unique role as a layperson leading a Jesuit institution. 

“Thank God for the laity,” she said. “Thank God that in an era when the expected lay role was to pay, pray, and obey, some few decided to raise their distinct lay voices to explore how Catholic faith could intersect with culture and politics—critically and fruitfully.”

Commonweal, which was recently profiled in the New York Times on the occasion of its centennial, produces a print magazine, podcasts, live and virtual events, and local community gatherings centered on reflective discussions of faith, public affairs, the arts, and the common good. Its past contributors include Dorothy Day, W.H. Auden, Hannah Arendt, John Updike, and Graham Greene. 

Tania Tetlow grew up in a uniquely Catholic and Jesuit-influenced household, where dinner conversation centered around intellect, scripture, and justice. Throughout her career, Tania’s Jesuit formation and devotion to justice have guided her, whether she was prosecuting violent crimes, helping lead recovery efforts for the New Orleans Library system post-Hurricane Katrina, or serving as the first female and lay president of a major Catholic university. 

On this episode of The Catholic Leaders Podcast, hosts Kerry Robinson and Kim Smolik sit down with Tania Tetlow, the current president of Fordham University. Tania grew up in New Orleans and spearheaded efforts to raise millions to rebuild and reimagine the city’s libraries after Hurricane Katrina as chair of the New Orleans Library board. She is a trailblazer in Catholic higher education, having served as the first female president of Loyola University New Orleans before becoming the first female president of Fordham in 2022.

“Places like Fordham were really created for those first generation students: the Irish Catholics, the Italians, and the Latinos and so many others. And so it’s a fundamental part of our DNA to be welcoming of all of those who would be excluded by the world, whose talent would be squandered.”

Teaching Civility

“What we have to work hard at as teachers … is to create the kind of freedom where we model for students that they can disagree with us, that we can argue about, not everything—there are facts that we are not going to argue about—but when it comes to that deep world of opinion and judgment and humility of being open and curious and willing to be wrong that is profoundly what we are supposed to do as a university, and is a profound part of the Catholic intellectual tradition.”

“We do this work cautiously, carefully and we wish we had more support and less attacks from the outside world.”

“The freedom to yell at each other is not enough. We really have to learn and teach students how they can persuade each other, how they can be open and humble and all the things that Ignatius taught us, and the work of discernment. It turns out that being self-righteous and sarcastic and mean doesn’t persuade people. It’s not who we are trying to be as human beings, but it’s also singularly ineffective.”

“What we’re trying to teach is the opposite of everything the world is teaching our students.”

Artificial Intelligence and Higher Ed

“This is going to disrupt the economy more quickly and more profoundly than the internet in a major way. So we have to think about pivoting to the kinds of skills our students will need in a world where ideally a lot of the skutt work of life gets done by AI and they are ferried out to do all sorts of magical, wonderful, humanistic things. I’m not sure it will pan out that way.”

“It is our obligation to prepare them for this changing world, to predict where are the jobs of the future because particularly the young people jobs are what will be most quickly eliminated by technology and [hone]those kinds of superior skills of emotional intelligence, diplomacy, of the kind of creativity that can’t be replaced by technology.”

This is a moment when we are going to have to be more nimble and to be a step ahead, not a hundred years behind. It’s a daunting time for all sorts of people, but particularly in education.”

“These are enormously complicated institutions with so many different constituencies,” she said. “How do you navigate the latest controversy while still moving the university forward?”

“Bridging the gap between what they can afford to pay and the excellence they deserve is getting harder and harder,” Tetlow said. “It’s important to understand those goals are in tension with each other.”

“I am so eager to console the students who are in a great deal of pain,” she told the journalists. “I find myself in the embarrassing situation of revealing to them I have less power than they imagine that I do.”

“It’s so much easier to tear down an institution than to build one,” she said.

“What I’m proud of is helping Fordham double down on who we are — a Jesuit institution in New York, determined to find out how we can have an impact on a really broken world.”

“The advantage we have at this moment in a religious university is the ability to unabashedly talk about values and faith,” she added. “That’s harder at secular institutions, because they have to worry about offending people.”

Responsibility

“In American society, we’ve always had a balance that was critical between individual rights and a sense of community and responsibility. That balance is really out of whack right now. We’ve leaned so heavily into individual rights, which are crucial. But if they’re unmoored from the idea of community, of what we owe each other, they’re really quite dangerous. If we’re all in it for ourselves, who are we? And so what Catholic teachings really offer is a reminder that we do have to care about community, that we have not just rights, but responsibilities.”

Discernment

“I know from our faculty that every day in the classroom they try to not just teach knowledge, but the skills of discernment, of what it means to have reflective practices, where we’re going to really think about what we learned and stop and take time. This is something that as a law professor, is part of our ethos: I need for you to articulate the other side of the argument, not because we’re morally relativist, but because you can’t know the strength of your belief until you’re willing to think about the other side.”

“I think our faculty do a brilliant job of navigating how to take the temperature down when people disagree, how to say, “Okay, you are attacking the other student who you disagree with. You’re attacking them personally. You’re assuming they have bad intentions. You’re not listening to them.”

Value of Higher Education

“Universities are one of the places of great hope. We do bring people together. And that’s not just the obvious demographics — it’s also rural and urban, it’s different backgrounds economically, it’s just different upbringings. And we’ve leaned into that from a progressive point hard, but also that they find commonality, that they have so much more in common when they least expect it.”

“It’s hard because there’s great political benefit to tearing down trust in institutions. It’s easy to do. It resonates with people who are understandably cynical. And once you’ve done it, it’s done. And it’s very hard to rebuild. You know, all of higher ed has become majority female and that’s a much deeper topic to grapple with, and one I worry about as well. 

“I think men are are opting out of the opportunities that they need in an increasingly knowledge-based economy, and we will all suffer as a result of that. And so I worry about that. So the return on investment is sort of laughable because when you look at the data, it is so clear the financial return on investment, right? Which just proves that you can make things up, and they stick. And I would say that part of what I find really offensive are politicians saying that it’s not worth it to go to college, none of whom say that to their own children.”

“President Tetlow is a model for Commonweal as it embarks on this journey. Her lay leadership, her commitment to issues of justice, her attention to forming and informing the next generation of Catholics and all people of goodwill, and her spirit of knowledge-seeking and creativity exemplify the values Commonweal continues to embody since publishing its first issue 100 years ago.”

“Amid the chaos currently afflicting higher education, there is another slow-moving disaster that has us all worried. The pandemic inflicted untold injury on the educational achievements of young people. In higher education, we already see the results on high school students, but we fret even more about the impact on little kids, the disruption of that all-important early childhood education. It is a ticking time bomb that cannot wait to be addressed until students come to our campuses, or worse, fail to come to college at all. Unless the nation does something, we all will take a serious hit in global competitiveness, to say nothing of our children’s opportunities. 

Here is an idea. Let’s build a National Tutoring Corp. For decades we have discussed the benefits of national service, the kind of purpose-driven experience that would bond young people across the country.  We may now face a crisis urgent enough to convince us to act. We should create a small army of tutors to help our children catch up from the pandemic gaps in their education.“

“We worked so hard for so long to ensure that children born into poverty could slowly but steadily catch up. Now they’ve fallen massively behind, and yet again we risk wasting their talent and crushing their dreams. I fear the next assessment of fourth and eighth graders during the 2023-24 school year will inspire more hand-wringing when its results are released.“

“[W]hen we look at those generations forged in the fires of suffering and crisis, we see the generations who mattered most to history. Class of 2024, you have become fiercely focused on what matters. You have refused to accept the brokenness of the world. You face the challenges ahead with courage. You look for truth with curiosity and openness. And today, especially today, you remember to find joy. There’s nothing more Jesuit than that,” said Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham University. 

President Tetlow said, “I have been very fortunate to have the guidance and support of AJCU’s board since 2018, when I was a new president at Loyola University New Orleans. It is an extraordinary group of leaders and I am humbled to be one of them, much less to chair our board.”

Read full story here.

“Being a university president is a tough job on a good day,” Ms. Tetlow said recently. “I think we’re all feeling fragile right now. These are tough issues to navigate.”

The ability to navigate through turbulence is one of the many assets that brought Ms. Tetlow to Fordham. Added to her wide-ranging résumé — putting murderers and drug lords in jail as a federal prosecutor in New Orleans, challenging longstanding gender barriers while untangling the finances of a foundering institution, singing the national anthem at Yankee Stadium — Ms. Tetlow’s somewhat unusual profile seems uniquely suited to Fordham.

Engaging and unmistakably sharp, Ms. Tetlow, 52, easily toggles from light cultural topics (dogs and ’90s bands) to more pressing issues, like climate change and the need for more government assistance to soften the financial strain of college. She regularly concludes statements with the clause “the research shows” — leaving little doubt of her grasp of it.

Read “Not a Priest, Not a Man, but Ready to Run Fordham” in The New York Times.