“I have such deep roots here, and I’m thrilled that we have a London campus,” said Tetlow, who has familial and professional connections in the U.K. “I’m so excited to dream even bigger about what we can do.”

The Oct. 26 event was part of a series of presidential welcome receptions scheduled for this academic year. Over the past few months, Tetlow has connected with members of the Fordham family in New Jersey and Washington, D.C. She is planning on visiting at least 10 more cities, including New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Miami.   

The reception was held at the Shard, the tallest building in Western Europe. It was attended by about 120 guests who traveled from the United Kingdom and other countries to attend. In total, about 10,000 Fordham alumni live abroad. 

From the Shard’s 34th-floor Sky Lounge, guests wined and dined while taking in panoramic views of the River Thames and iconic London landmarks such as Tower Bridge and St. Paul’s Cathedral. 

The reception began with a moment of silence for the late Scott Simpson, LAW ’82, a member of the Fordham London Advisory Board and the father of two Fordham graduates, who died last spring. Ginger F. Zaimis, a current board member, recited her translated excerpt from Meditations, a famous text by Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Later, Tetlow presented a token of appreciation to the evening’s host, William Loschert, GABELLI ’61, a trustee fellow who played a significant role in bringing Fordham London to life. (In 2021, he was also knighted by the Vatican.) 

Life Abroad in the ‘Greatest City in the World’

Before Tetlow formally addressed the guests, three current students offered her a warm welcome and reflected on their time at Fordham London. 

Kyla McCallum, a senior at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, introduced herself as a transfer student from the University of Michigan. She said that when she decided to enroll at Fordham, she heard stories from students at other universities who had experienced tough transfers. For her, it was the opposite. Upon her acceptance, she learned that she would need to complete the rest of her education on Fordham’s campus—and luckily, the University has one in the heart of  London. 

“In addition to receiving a Jesuit liberal arts education, I also get a global experience—something I barely dared to hope for after transferring amid the COVID pandemic,” said McCallum, who studies new media and digital design.

At Fordham London, she is learning about the business of fashion, Christianity, and Shakespeare. The latter course offers trips such as an outing to Shakespeare’s Globe, where McCallum and her classmates saw The Tempest and another Shakespeare play that features a 21st-century twist.  

“What I didn’t anticipate from my Shakespeare class was for our professor to take us to a queer retelling of A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” she said. “Fordham professors are remarkably dedicated to inclusion of diverse identities in their curriculum.” 

In London, she said, she has found a new culture and a future abroad. In fact, she’s planning to apply to master’s programs at schools in the United Kingdom after she graduates. 

A Gabelli Education in London: One of the ‘Financial Capitals of the World’ 

Matthew O’Sullivan, a junior at the Gabelli School of Business, has lived in London for only about two months, but said the city now feels like home. He’s even gotten used to vehicles driving on the left side of the road.

“I’ve gotten very comfortable with being here, even down to simply crossing the street—looking right, and then left,” said O’Sullivan, a business administration student from Garden City, New York.

O’Sullivan said that being able to study in both New York and London is especially helpful for him, since the two cities are among the world’s financial capitals. Sometimes, though, the best education comes from experiencing life in London—from trying beans on toast to successfully traversing the city in the Tube, he said. 

“During my time here, I’ve witnessed two monarchs, almost three prime ministers, so who knows—I could be prime minister by the end of the semester,” O’Sullivan joked. “But studying abroad here in London has … certainly has opened up a new chapter in my life, just as we’re opening a new chapter in the history of Fordham by welcoming President Tetlow to our amazing community.” 

Fordham London: ‘A Judgment-Free’ Home 

The final student speaker, Bradley Moyer, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, delivered a poignant speech about the role that the University has played in his life. Moyer said that he started college during a difficult time in his personal life, and the pandemic worsened his situation. The Fordham community offered him the support that he needed, he said. 

“Fordham offered me support with excellent professors and new people that I could rely on,” said Moyer, a New Jersey native who is majoring in communication and culture. “The staff at Fordham … helped me in the summer to get through missed work and had faith in me when I felt like I had none.” 

Moyer—who participated in Fordham’s second drag show—said Fordham’s New York and London programs both offer “judgment-free zones that allow everyone to be who they are.” 

‘I’m So Glad to Be Among You’ 

Tetlow concluded the evening with some reflections on her own connections to the United Kingdom. 

In her late 20s, she joined the British-American Project, an organization that promotes cross-cultural understanding among young leaders. Through the group, she made many friends in London and met her future husband, Gordon Stewart, who was living in Glasgow at the time. Today, she has a daughter, Lucy, who has American/British dual citizenship; a stepson who lives in Scotland; and a home in Fife, Scotland, with their family. 

“I am proudly bilingual. I drink a cuppa. I take out the rubbish. I feel chuffed from all this praise,” she said, to laughter. “And I can, if I’ve had a couple of pints, even understand Geordie. That’s how local I feel.”

Tetlow asked the guests to help her to build on the strengths that already exist at Fordham’s London campus by sharing potential student internships, guest speakers, and resources with Vanessa Beever, senior director of Fordham London. 

“Thank you for demonstrating what Fordham means, what our students become, to the parents who’ve entrusted us with your children, to the friends who’ve helped us in so many ways,” Tetlow said. “We love you all—and I’m so glad to be among you.”

View all the photos from the event here. 

Attendees represented nearly every one of the University’s schools and colleges, and class years from every decade going back to the 1950s.

Mary Anne Sullivan, TMC ’73, vice chair of the Fordham University Board of Trustees, and her husband, Larry Petro, hosted the reception at the Washington, D.C., offices of Hogan Lovells, where Sullivan is a partner.

“Washington event spaces are often all about the view,” Sullivan noted as she greeted attendees, who mingled in a light-filled reception room and on its adjoining terrace as the sun set over the Washington Monument a few blocks away.

Before introducing Tetlow, Sullivan spoke about the impact Fordham and Jesuit education have had on her own life—an impact that began with her parents, both of whom were Fordham Law School graduates.

She said her mother, a daughter of Irish immigrants, attended both the School of Education and the School of Law at night during the 1940s. She eventually became a judge, and Sullivan said both of her parents were leaders in the fair housing movement in Albany. “We didn’t talk about ‘men and women for others’ then. That’s just the life they lived. And what they taught me.”

She said when she got to Fordham as an undergraduate at the tail end of the 1960s, she loved “studying hard about things that were hard.” And though she described herself as “a bit of a nerd,” she was also among student protesters who “took over the administration building during the war in Vietnam.”

“That was my first visit to what is now Tania’s office,” she said to laughter from attendees, some of whom were among those who occupied the Fordham president’s office at the time.

“Decades later,” Sullivan said, “I remember specific conversations I had with individual professors about metaphysics—my major—Russian literature, and economics, to name just a few. I learned to think hard and to think about things in ways I had not previously considered. There were so many aha moments … and the skills I took away from Fordham have served me over and over in all aspects of my life.”

Sullivan said she’s now looking forward to seeing that “future generations of Fordham grads” have the same opportunities she had—“their own aha moments, their own experiences of New York that only Fordham can provide, and strong skills to bring to making the world a better place.”

She described Tetlow as the right leader at the right time for Fordham.

“She’s clear-eyed about the enormous challenges facing higher education and the challenges facing our students, but that doesn’t make her cautious,” Sullivan said. “It makes her bold, ambitious, impatient, ready to play the long game, as she says, to move forward.”

Sullivan said her favorite line from Tetlow’s recent State of the University address is one that “parents in the room here will really appreciate: ‘Every penny that Fordham spends represents the life savings of our families.’”

“This is a woman who’s going to move us forward by keeping her eyes on everything that matters to our students and their families,” Sullivan said.

A ‘Sense of Driving Purpose’

The event marked Tetlow’s first official visit to Washington, D.C., as president of Fordham, but she told attendees that she is no stranger to the nation’s capital.

“I grew up in New Orleans, and my mentor was Congresswoman Lindy Boggs, so I would come up here all the time. … She taught me to love this city, to love the Congress, and to love the history of the place,” Tetlow said, “so I just feel so at home here.”

She spoke about her love for Jesuit education—“that sense of driving purpose that makes us thrilled to come to work every day, to teach, to have an impact on the world as we do and as Fordham does in magnificent ways.”

In her first months as president, she has been delighting in the many stories she’s heard from alumni about how Fordham has made all the difference in their lives, she said. Many of them were the first in their family to go to college, and for them, “Fordham was the trajectory that sent them into a world that would have squandered their talents. But Fordham didn’t,” she said.

“The direction I want to us aim is to have as much impact on the world as we can, which is the point of why we do what we do, but it’s also in our self-interest, because this generation of students demands that,” Tetlow said. “They are a cynical bunch. They inherited a pretty broken world … [and] they want to know that the school they chose isn’t just virtue signaling. They want to know that it’s a place that really matters.”

The reception in Washington, D.C., was one of a series of opportunities for alumni to meet Tetlow throughout the country—and even in London—in her first year as president. To see a full list of events, visit forever.fordham.edu/presidential.

“It’s radical, it’s different, it’s good,” Victor Tuohy, GABELLI ’70, ’72, said of Tetlow’s appointment as the first layperson and first woman to serve as president of Fordham in its 181-year history.

Tetlow, who had served as president of Loyola University New Orleans for four years before beginning her tenure at Fordham on July 1, told attendees the story of how she exists because of the University—her parents met and fell in love as graduate students at Rose Hill in the late 1960s. Although her father, Louis Mulry Tetlow, Ph.D., passed away in May 2017, one year before she became president of Loyola New Orleans, she credited him with helping to prepare her to lead that Jesuit institution and now his alma mater Fordham, in part because he had been a Jesuit priest before leaving the order to start a family.

‘Doubling Down’ on Fordham’s Jesuit Catholic Identity

Tetlow said that Fordham’s future is about “really doubling down [on] our identity” as a Jesuit Catholic institution.

She described Fordham as “a place that really believes in training our students in discipline and hard work and keen intelligence, and giving them the tools to go out there and make a difference,” to “lead lives of purpose and integrity” and become “the kind of people that you in this room, as alums, represent so well.”

Joan Garry, FCRH ’79, said that she believes Tetlow is the right person to carry forth the Jesuit tradition at Fordham.

“I also think that you don’t have to be a Jesuit to embody the values of Jesuit education,” she said.

Garry said that she and her wife, Eileen, often refer to Jesuit values as “interfaith values”—ones that can include people of many different backgrounds and beliefs.

“I think that for the University to make a statement, that [the president] is a female who is not a Jesuit, actually amplifies that message” of inclusion, she said.

Tetlow said that she believes there’s “real momentum” surrounding Fordham, particularly because of its location in “the most exciting city in the world, the center of the global economy, the place of so much opportunity and cultural richness and chances to be a person who has impact.”

“I’ve now figured out that every third person I meet in the city of New York went to Fordham, and there’s a reason our graduates get really good jobs here because you all take care of them,” she said, gesturing to the alumni in the room.

Among the attendees was Robert E. Campbell, GABELLI ’55, a trustee emeritus and former chair of the Fordham Board of Trustees who led the 2002 search committee that selected Tetlow’s predecessor, Joseph M. McShane, S.J. He said he hoped she would build on Father McShane’s accomplishments in the past two decades and on her unique experiences as a leader to continue to elevate the university.

“I think it’s great,” he said, after he met with her right before the official reception began. “It’s a whole new perspective—it’s just new and exciting and I think that she’ll be great.”

For young alumna Mia Behrens, FCRH ’21, seeing Fordham hire its first woman president was powerful. She said that she and her friends thought the University was still a few presidents away from hiring a layperson, let alone a woman.

“I think it’s definitely really exciting to see a woman in a position of power,” she said. “I also think everyone knows that she has big shoes to fill [in following] Father McShane, and I think picking a woman was a really good idea because there’s not going to be as much comparison—it’s going to be just a completely new Fordham era.”

Behrens attended the reception with Liam Fitzmaurice, GABELLI ’21, who described meeting Tetlow as “an awesome experience.”

“I think it’s pretty exciting to see what she’s going to do with the school, being the first non-Jesuit president,” he said.

Ottilie Droggitis, a 1978 graduate of Marymount College, said she is excited that Fordham has its first woman president, and she hopes it will strengthen the bonds between Fordham and Marymount, which was part of Fordham from 2002 until the college closed in 2007.

“As a woman who graduated from an all-women’s college and is on the [college’s alumnae] board, I can tell you that we are just thrilled now that a woman is … the head of the University,” she said.

The Importance of Alumni

In her speech at the reception, Tetlow said she’s been trying to immerse herself in Fordham and its community.

“I’m learning so much, listening really hard, and really hearing the stories of extraordinary possibility,” she said.

Tetlow emphasized the importance of how Fordham alumni have helped fuel the University’s growth.

“The institutions whose trajectories take off are the ones whose alumni believe in them and invest in them and are the champions who go out and spread the word, who send their own children, who convince other people to send their children, who … make transformative gifts that matter to the institution [and] take us to the next level,” she said. “And I have met so many of you to know that we are building on something really special.”

The presidential reception in Spring Lake was the first opportunity for alumni to meet with Tetlow, with more following around the country—and even in London—later this year. To see a full list of events, visit forever.fordham.edu/presidential. Tetlow will also be at Fordham’s Homecoming on Saturday, September 17.