“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.

A year later, Biggins co-founded the Special Olympics Club at Fordham to help create welcoming and supportive environments for adults and children with disabilities.

“The goal of our organization is to raise awareness of Special Olympics and the special needs community, and to find ways to bring Fordham students and Special Olympic athletes [in New York]together,” said Biggins, who currently serves as the club’s president. “Our third goal is to form a beautiful community on campus that embraces inclusion, acceptance, and welcomes all people.”

On April 8, more than 30 Fordham students and Special Olympics Club members joined Camp Acorn, an Allendale-based nonprofit serving individuals with special needs, on a day trip to the Bronx Zoo. Each club member helped the campers to navigate the different exhibitions at the zoo.

“It was really amazing,” said Fordham College at Rose Hill sophomore Jeannine Ederer, vice president and coordinator of the Special Olympics Club. “They told us that they had never gone through as much of the zoo as they did with us, so that was a big accomplishment on both ends.”

Ederer said Fordham students were able to bond with individuals from the special needs community through the event.

“You don’t always have the opportunity to connect with people with disabilities on a personal level and understand what they’re capable of,” she said. “Being paired one-on-one with the campers for an entire day allowed us to learn so many things about them.”

Raising awareness

To promote its mission, the club hosted several events on campus during their Spirit Week, which ran from February 26 through March 3. That week the club held its Second Annual Red Out Fashion Show, which gave Fordham students and Special Olympians an opportunity to hit the catwalk together.

According to Gabelli School sophomore Morgan Menzzasalma, the club’s treasurer, Special Olympics athletes are often left out of many traditional extracurricular activities that are offered at schools. The club’s fashion show was an opportunity to have an event focused solely on them, she said.

“It was great to see the smiles on the children’s faces during the show,” said Menzzasalma, a track and field athlete at Fordham. “At first they started out timid, but by the end of the show, we couldn’t get them off the stage!”

The fashion show featured a live performance from American Idol contestant Brielle Von Hugel, and several raffle donations. The items included customized Fordham keepsakes from Tiffany’s, which were provided by the Office of the President; an autographed baseball from the Boston Red Sox’s Xander Bogaerts; an autographed hockey puck from the New York Rangers’ J.T. Miller; and VIP tickets for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and LIVE with Kelly. According to Biggins, the fashion show raised over $2,000 in support of Special Olympics New York City.

Advocating for change

Since the club launched in 2015, its members have worked to create events and initiatives that shed light on the challenges that individuals with disabilities face, many of which go beyond physical and intellectual limitations, they said.

Biggins said hearing the word “retard,” in particular, has harmful effects on the self-esteem of individuals in the special needs community. Through their “Why We Pledge” campaign, which coincided with the National Spread the Word to End the Word Pledge Day, the Special Olympics Club sought to inspire students to eliminate the R-word from their own vocabulary, and to encourage their peers to do the same.

“Social awareness is everyone’s responsibility, even if it just a small act of kindness each day,” said men’s soccer team player Christopher Bazzini, a Gabelli School junior who has been working with the special needs community for more than four years. “You don’t have to start a massive movement to help others; it could be something as simple as pledging to stop using the R-word.”

Club members said they hope students across the University would not only join them in raising awareness, but also in taking action.

“Students can often get caught up in their daily school activities, but this club has allowed me to keep others who are less fortunate than me in mind,” said Menzzasalma. “From this experience, I have gained great friends and have learned that, even as a college student, I can make a significant impact in bringing joy to another [person’s] life.”

For Timothy Shriver, an educator, author, entrepreneur, and chairman of the Special Olympics, the mental health crisis affecting so many young people cannot be ignored by the institutions of higher education where they study.The solution lies not in teaching students to do more, but in teaching them to do less, said Shriver. In fact, it is in teaching them to do nothing—that is, to engage in contemplative practices such as mindfulness meditation and sitting in silence as a means of gaining greater self-awareness.

On April 27 at Fordham Law School, Shriver shared his views on implementing contemplative practices into higher education in conversation with faculty members, administrators, students, members of the Jesuit community, and other invited guests. The event was sponsored by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture.

Joined by his wife, Linda, and their daughter, Caroline, a freshman at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, Shriver extolled the experience of silence as a means through which one can combat depression and anxiety by encountering the true self and coming to self-acceptance.

“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 addressed the fact that though so many religious traditions have contemplative practices at their root, these techniques are rarely offered as a means of coping with day-to-day problems.

“If we are looking at people who are so hungry for a sense of their own beauty and goodness, why is it that we haven’t created a developmental path using the resources of our religious traditions, translating them into contemporary practice to allow young people to access them?” he asked.

Fordham community members agreed with Shriver that there is a great hunger among students for classes and experiences that help them connect with their inner selves.

Father Jose-Luis Salazar, SJ, executive director of Campus Ministry, said that all of the retreat programs offered each year are overbooked.

Stephen Grimm, PhD, associate professor of philosophy who teaches a course called Philosophy as a Way of Life, said that it filled up “in seconds.”

For Shriver, who has a master’s degree in religion and religious education, a doctoral degree in education, and who worked for 15 years in the New Haven, Connecticut, public school system, the benefits of contemplative practice are clear.

“All the data suggests that integrating ‘the pause’—whatever we want to call it—increases academic achievement, decreases psychopathology, and increases positives states and satisfaction across the board,” he said.

Shriver’s book, Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most (Crichton 2014), recounts his own spiritual journey and his work with the Special Olympics.

–Nina Heidig