She is the first layperson and first woman to lead the Jesuit University of New York in its 181-year history.

A graduate of Tulane University and Harvard Law School, she has been a changemaker for decades—as a scholar, professor, federal prosecutor, community advocate, and university leader. When the Board of Trustees announced her appointment in February, Tetlow said she was “honored beyond measure” to have been chosen as Fordham’s next president, and she pledged to come to the University with “my whole self—as a leader and a teacher, as a wife and a mom, and a person of faith.”

By way of introduction, here are 33 things to know about the 33rd president of Fordham University.

1. She is a trailblazer.

Even before she made history at Fordham, Tetlow blazed a trail at another Jesuit university, Loyola New Orleans, where she was the first woman and first layperson to serve as president. At Jesuit universities, she has said, mission “isn’t something we ask of the dozen priests on our campus; it’s the responsibility of each and every one of us.”

2. Fordham is where her parents met.

Tetlow grew up in New Orleans, but “Fordham is the reason that I exist,” she said in a video message to the University community in February. Her parents met as Fordham graduate students, and she was born in New York.

Tetlow’s late father, Louis Mulry Tetlow, an educator, clinical psychologist, and former Jesuit priest, earned his Ph.D. At Fordham in 1974, four years after earning a master’s degree from the University. Her mother, Elisabeth Meier Tetlow, is also a double Ram, classes of 1967 and 1970, having earned two of her five master’s degrees—in philosophy and theology—from Fordham. A biblical scholar, she later earned a J.D. from Loyola New Orleans and is the author of several books, including a two-volume work titled Women, Crime and Punishment in Ancient Law and Society.

At the February 10 press conference announcing her appointment as president, Tetlow shared that her mother was “very tickled” to receive an invitation, as a Fordham alumna, to attend the event unveiling the new president of the University.

3. She’s had a Jesuit Catholic education since birth.

As a newborn, Tetlow was welcomed at the Jesuit community on Marion Avenue in the Bronx, where her parents met. Her father had been a Jesuit for 17 years before leaving the order to start a family.

“I hope that in raising me and my sisters so steeped in the church, in the Jesuit charism, in the Jesuit way of proceeding, that he has really done right by both his family and by the Jesuits,” Tetlow said.

She said her parents instilled in her “an abiding curiosity to find God in all things, which meant going on walks as a child and learning all about the fractal geometry in the curl of a fern. They sang me to sleep with a Gregorian chant and taught me the absolute joy of learning.”

4. Trailblazing politician Lindy Boggs—champion of women’s rights, nine-term member of Congress, and U.S. ambassador to the Vatican—was her mentor.

In 1988, as a first-year student at Tulane, Tetlow wrote to her congresswoman, Lindy Boggs: “I would like to be you when I grow up. Could I please meet you?”

Boggs had represented Louisiana in Congress since 1973, when she succeeded her husband, Hale Boggs, who had disappeared following a plane crash in Alaska. In 1974, she ensured that women would be protected under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Two years later, she became the first woman to preside over a Democratic National Convention. She was, Tetlow later wrote, “a powerful politician of unquestioned integrity and famed charms.”

To the teenage Tetlow’s surprise, Boggs’ secretary called her to set up an appointment. “When the day finally arrived, my parents dropped me off at the federal building downtown for my appointment with destiny. I wore stockings, I think, and something approaching a suit,” she wrote in a 2012 essay, “Lindy and Me.”

Tetlow eventually worked as a summer intern in Boggs’ Washington, D.C., office, and when Boggs retired from Congress and accepted a position as counselor to the president of Tulane in 1991, Tetlow was her aide. “Lindy carefully tutored me about women in politics, about power and conscience, about the purpose of a life’s career,” Tetlow wrote.

In a 2019 interview on AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast, she described Boggs as “an incredibly devout Catholic” and an “absolutely brilliant, amazing diplomat. She taught me how to be virtuous and to live your faith in the world not by withdrawing from it and keeping yourself pure, but by engaging with power every day and mattering.”

5. She was 16 when she started college.

Growing up, Tetlow was often ahead of the curve. She skipped fifth grade, started high school at age 12, and four years later, enrolled at Tulane University, where she majored in American studies and earned a B.A. cum laude in 1992.

6. Scholarships transformed her life.

In 1988, Tetlow was a National Merit Scholar and also received a Dean’s Honor Scholarship to attend Tulane. Three years later, she earned a prestigious Harry S. Truman Scholarship, which “made all the difference” in her life, she said in 2019. “It was a high honor that helped me get into, and afford, Harvard Law School and pursue my dream of a career in public service.”

7. Hurricane Katrina changed her.

Last October, Tetlow was invited to preach at First Grace United Methodist Church in New Orleans. Founded in 2007, First Grace united two churches—one with a historically white congregation, one historically Black—that had been damaged by Hurricane Katrina.

Tetlow told congregants that before the storm, she had “spent a lot of time building my sense of myself and my esteem on the idea of getting A’s in school and achieving things younger than most and … the praise I got and the important people that I knew.”

Amid the death, destruction, and despair caused by Katrina, she said, that suddenly felt like a castle made of sand, built on “pride and arrogance.” She ultimately found a way to “let go of my own self-pity and suffering,” she said, and “throw myself into the work, as we all did, of rebuilding and being there for people in their suffering.”

She said First Grace’s story, of congregations overcoming historical divisions and inertia to become one community, inspires her “to find the insight we lose when we’re not paying attention—the urgency that we need [to come together], not just in a crisis.”

8. She’s a former federal prosecutor.

After earning her J.D. from Harvard magna cum laude in 1995, Tetlow spent a year as a law clerk for U.S. Circuit Judge James Dennis and four years as an associate in the New Orleans office of Phelps Dunbar before becoming a federal prosecutor.

From 2000 to 2005, as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Louisiana, she specialized in general and violent crimes and major narcotics cases. She also worked closely with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to prosecute cases involving financial fraud, arson, wiretap investigations, and bank robberies.

9. She led Tulane’s Domestic Violence Clinic.

In 2005, Tetlow left the U.S. attorney’s office to become the Felder-Fayard Professor of Law and director of the Domestic Violence Clinic at Tulane Law School. She led the clinic for 10 years, securing $2.3 million in grants from the Department of Justice while teaching students to provide legal services to victims of domestic abuse, relationship violence, stalking, and sexual assault.

10. She helped revive the New Orleans Public Library System.

As chair of the New Orleans Library Board and Foundation, Tetlow spearheaded a campaign that raised $7 million to rebuild the city’s flooded public libraries after Hurricane Katrina.

11. She met her Scottish-born husband at a conference to promote cross-cultural understanding.

Tetlow and her husband, Gordon Stewart, met in England in 2005 and began dating several years later. They were delegates to the annual conference of the British-American Project, which promotes cross-cultural understanding among young leaders. “In our case it worked out really well,” Tetlow told The New York Times, which published the couple’s wedding announcement on October 3, 2009. Stewart, a master brewer and distiller from Glasgow, Scotland, told the Times he was “impressed when he first saw her on a panel giving a personal account of rescuing her parents in New Orleans after the hurricane two months before.”

12. Her research helped the U.S. Department of Justice develop new anti-discrimination policies.

As a law scholar, Tetlow focused on equal protection, particularly race and gender discrimination. “It’s always mattered to me,” she once said, “to be the kind of academic who had an impact on the world.”

In “Discriminatory Acquittal,” a 2009 article published in the William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, she described the long history, from the Emmett Till trial to Rodney King and the present day, of juries discriminating against Black victims. She also described how juries use acquittals to “punish female victims of rape and domestic violence for failing to meet gender norms.” Recognizing the unconstitutionality of such acquittals, she argued, would help protect victims. Lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil rights division agreed. They credited the article with helping to inspire a new focus on discriminatory underenforcement of the law in its investigations of police departments.

13. The State Department asked her to join a U.S. delegation to China.

In 2014, Tetlow was one of four people chosen by the State Department to take part in the U.S.–China People-to-People Exchange program, which promotes discussion and collaboration on topics not typically covered in formal government summits. In Beijing, Tetlow shared her expertise on U.S. laws on domestic violence and the support of survivors. She has also provided technical assistance to family law clinics in Rwanda and Iran.

14. She led a complete turnaround of the New Orleans Police Department’s Special Victims Section.

In late 2014, after the New Orleans inspector general found that the city’s police department was misclassifying rape cases as lesser offenses and not properly documenting evidence or following up on cases involving sex crimes, then mayor Mitch Landrieu asked Tetlow to lead the Sexual Assault Reform Advisory Committee.

He “charged us with creating immediate and fundamental systemic reform,” she wrote in an August 2015 article in the New Orleans Advocate after publishing the committee’s report. The report “does not present the typical set of flowery proposals” but instead “lists dozens of practical reforms” to increase the number of detectives in the sex crimes and child abuse units and “create a lasting framework to ensure the quality of their work.”

In June 2016, the inspector general issued a follow-up report: “What was bad before is very good now,” he said. “It’s a remarkable turnaround.”

15. She helped make workforce management policy decisions for New Orleans.

Tetlow served on several boards in New Orleans, including the Civil Service Commission. In that role, she launched a compensation and staffing study of the entire city workforce, made workforce management policy decisions, and adjudicated appeals—all in an effort to make city government more efficient and effective.

16. She sings opera and Gregorian chant.

Tetlow has taken voice lessons on and off throughout her life, and she’s even sung professionally on occasion. At her Missioning Mass on the eve of her inauguration as president of Loyola New Orleans, she led the Jesuits and the choir in singing the “Salve Regina,” a hymn the Jesuits have sung for nearly 500 years.

“If nothing else, I sing really well for a university president,” she said with a laugh on the AMDG podcast in 2019, where she also shared that singing opera makes her feel alive.

17. She took an ‘untraditional path’ to university leadership.

In 2015, she served briefly as associate provost of international affairs at Tulane before being named senior vice president and chief of staff to the president, Michael Fitts—a role not typically seen as a prelude to a presidency but one that gave her a deeper understanding of the full breadth of the university. As one of Fitts’ top strategic advisers, she played a key role in significant advances in admissions, rankings, diversity, research strength, and fundraising. She also spearheaded efforts to make meaningful progress on race and equity, and on addressing campus sexual assault.

In March, NY1 featured Tetlow in a Women’s History Month segment highlighting “modern-day trailblazers.” The host asked her about her penchant for making history. “I think I jumped ahead in some ways by taking an untraditional path,” Tetlow said. “There are many obstacles to women becoming deans and provosts, so instead I was a law professor and then chief of staff to a university president.”

18. She was a transformative leader at Loyola.

Tetlow took the helm at Loyola New Orleans in August 2018, becoming the first woman and first layperson to lead the 110-year-old Jesuit institution. She steered the university through a remarkable economic turnaround after the most financially difficult period in its history. Under her stewardship, Loyola improved its bond rating, increased student retention, saw enrollment rise, and expanded online, graduate, and professional programs.

19. Her vision extends beyond campus.

At Loyola, she led the implementation of a strategic plan for inclusive excellence at the university, where ethnic minorities represent 51% of all undergraduates. And at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, she oversaw the creation of an undergraduate nursing program in partnership with a New Orleans health system.

20. She was the unanimous choice for Fordham.

On February 10, after a national search, the Fordham Board of Trustees unanimously elected Tetlow to serve as the 33rd president of the Jesuit University of New York.

“The Board of Trustees and the search committee were deeply impressed by Tania Tetlow from the moment we met her,” Robert D. Daleo, GABELLI ’72, chair of the board, wrote in a message to the University community. “She is deeply rooted in, and a strong proponent of, Ignatian spirituality, and will be a champion of Fordham’s Jesuit, Catholic mission and identity. She has a deep understanding of and comprehensive vision for undergraduate liberal arts and sciences, the Gabelli School of Business, Fordham Law, and all of the graduate and professional schools of the University.”

21. She is a student of history—and of the moral choices we make in ‘a thousand tiny daily tests’ of faith and courage.

In June, Tetlow said that she was reading Msgr. Thomas Shelley’s book Fordham: A History of the Jesuit University of New York: 1841–2003 and gaining a deeper understanding of the factors and decisions that have fueled the University’s growth.

“There are some who find looking back on history a self-righteous exercise in 20/20 hindsight,” she once wrote, but it teaches us that “moral choices in life are rarely labeled, ‘heroes turn this way, villains the other.’

“The most critical of decisions come in the form of a thousand tiny daily tests … of faith and courage. We learn more when we really put ourselves in the shoes … of those who made the wrong choices. We gain the humility necessary to acknowledge our own blind spots. We gain resolve to see through the fog of denial and get it right the next time, to think about how our grandchildren will look back at our own heroism or failure.”

22. She’s both practical and visionary.

Joseph M. Mcshane, S.J., president emeritus of Fordham, has described his successor as a dear friend, “the perfect choice” for Fordham, and a “great, great administrator” who brought Loyola New Orleans out of “a very difficult moment” four years ago and “really transformed the place.”

“She’s practical and visionary at the same time—a rare combination,” he said, noting that she “has in abundance the qualities of leadership one needs to run a major university, among them discernment, patience, decisiveness, self-awareness, and magnanimity.

“Her commitment to Jesuit pedagogy and to Fordham’s Jesuit, Catholic mission is both deep and well-informed. I shall rest easy with her in the office I have occupied for almost two decades.”

23. Experts on higher education are impressed by the skill set she brings to the presidency.

In May, Tetlow was a guest on the popular higher education podcast Future U, alongside Holy Cross president Vincent Rougeau. Both of them are the first laypeople to lead their respective Jesuit schools, and they’re also both trained as lawyers, which gives them a special kind of preparation for the challenges of leading large, complex organizations.

Jeff Selingo, co-host of the podcast, identified three key roles university presidents must play to succeed: chief storyteller, chief resource allocator, and chief operating officer—all of which, he said, are things that lawyers could do “very, very well” based on their training, especially lawyers who, like Tetlow, “have a good public presence.”

24. She’s the head of Fordham’s first-ever ‘first family.’

Tetlow and her husband, Gordon, have a 10-year-old daughter, who Tetlow said is “really excited about the family adventure.” Tetlow is also stepmother to Gordon’s teenage son, who lives in Scotland but plans to visit often. And the family includes Archie, a golden retriever who is “still an exuberant puppy,” Tetlow said. She joked that maybe he can learn to be an emotional support dog for students someday. “We are all excited to be part of Fordham,” she said, “to be home.”

25. Her uncle Joseph Tetlow, S.J., is a renowned expert on Jesuit spirituality.

Tetlow has described her uncle Joseph Tetlow, S.J., as her “personal guru for all wisdom in the world.” He baptized her, presided over her and Gordon’s wedding ceremony in 2009, and baptized their daughter, Lucy, in 2012.

For eight years, Father Tetlow served in Rome as head of the Secretariat for Ignatian Spirituality. He has held other important roles, from president of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley to associate editor of America magazine. He is currently writing full time at the Montserrat Jesuit Retreat House in Lake Dallas, Texas.

26. She sees parallels between the Big Easy and the Big Apple.

Soon after moving from New Orleans to New York in June, Tetlow visited Arthur Avenue, the Cloisters, and Rockaway Beach. And she started to see a connection between the two cities that she hadn’t noticed on her many visits to New York.

“One thing I’m realizing driving around is that—I don’t know what your vision of New Orleans is, but it is a gritty port city full of German, Irish, and Italian Catholic immigrants,” she said. “There’s much about the neighborhoods here that makes me feel at home.”

When asked which city has better food, she said, “New Orleans food is extraordinary, and I can’t wait to cook for you”—gumbo is her signature dish—“but New York has amazing food from every country in the world.” Part of what drew her to Fordham, she said, is a belief not only in the power and quality of a Fordham Jesuit education but also in the “limitless and thrilling” possibilities of the “most exciting city in the world.”

27. She’s a thought leader and advocate for young people.

In response to issues of equity in higher education, she has penned several op-eds in national media outlets advocating justice and increased support for the country’s young people. Last December, for example, she called on Congress to increase Pell Grants, creating something like a new GI Bill to help “reboot the economy and preserve it from lasting damage” amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “Think about the impact the GI Bill had on so many of our families and the trajectory of American greatness,” she wrote.

28. Before beginning her service as president, she made a weeklong Ignatian pilgrimage to Rome to mark the 500th anniversary of the conversion of St. Ignatius.

In late June, Tetlow joined a Fordham delegation to Rome, where she met with Arturo Sosa, S.J., superior general of the Society of Jesus; Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican secretary of state; and Cardinal Giuseppe Versaldi, Vatican prefect for Catholic education. She also walked in the footsteps of Ignatius, the founder of the Society of Jesus, who spent 15 years in Rome.

29. She believes Jesuit education inspires people to get into ‘good trouble,’ as the late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis used to say. And it’s right in tune with the zeitgeist.

In May, the co-hosts of the Future U podcast asked Tetlow about the viability of Jesuit education today. She said it’s not only timeless, backed by “the credibility we get from [nearly] 500 years of academic excellence,” but also right for the moment, when young people are passionate about wanting to question assumptions and fix systems. “The Jesuits have gotten into ‘good trouble’ for centuries by being willing to … ask the hard questions … to really make a difference in the world. That’s who we are in our DNA.”

30. Fordham, she believes, is an antidote to an increasingly divided world.

Tetlow has described the political moment as “treacherous,” with people “cleaving into tribes and drowning in polemic.” Fordham is a key to moving forward together, she insists.

“If you were to design an antidote to a world that is increasingly divided, it would be a place that brings together the best and brightest from every corner of the Earth and teaches them to learn from each other,” she said. “It would be a place that believes in truth and works tirelessly to find it; a place that tries to solve the toughest of problems with science and technology and, most of all, by understanding humanity—what drives us, how we structure our communities and economies … how we build a common good with ethics, empathy, and faith.”

31. She’s excited about getting to know—and learn from—the Fordham community.

In her introductory press conference, Tetlow said she’s excited to talk with faculty about their research and the students they love, and to find out from staff about the ways they constantly work to make Fordham better, and the ideas they have for the future. Most of all, though, she’s excited to connect with students—“to be part of your community, to have you push me, to teach me things, to listen hard to you, to be part of the joy that you bring to the work that we do.”

32. She’ll soon hit the road to introduce herself to alumni.

Tetlow is eager to meet alumni, she said, “to hear about how Fordham changed your life” and “not only gave you the tools to succeed … but to understand that success is about … the life of integrity that you lead, the change you make in the world.” Her tour will begin on August 25 with a reception in Spring Lake, New Jersey. After welcoming alumni and families to campus for Homecoming on September 17, she plans to attend events in Washington, D.C.; London; Fairfield County, Connecticut; and New Orleans. In 2023, she’s planning stops in Phoenix, Chicago, California, and Florida. Learn more and register to attend a reception in your area at forever.fordham.edu/presidential.

33. Her formal inauguration will take place in October.

The University community will celebrate Tania Tetlow’s inauguration during a series of events beginning with the President’s Inaugural Ball for students on September 16, the night before Homecoming, and culminating with the Missioning Mass and installation ceremony on Friday, October 14. Learn more at fordham.edu/inauguration.

Our Shared Storm tells the overlapping stories of four characters as they play out in five different future scenarios. Each of the five parts of the book takes place in the year 2054 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of the Parties—better known as the COP—as a superstorm approaches. The characters’ roles, motivations, and actions differ, though, as a result of how their worlds have dealt or failed to deal with the effects of climate change.

There’s Diya, whose job is different in each story, but who is consistently a power player within the world of climate negotiations. There’s Luis, a Buenos Aires local who exists around the periphery of the conference, from being a driver in one story to a kidnapper in another. There’s Saga, a climate activist (and in one story, a pop star) whose level of pessimism—and comfort—in dealing with government delegates oscillates from part to part. And then there’s Noah, whom Hudson described as his “personal id,” a mid-level U.S. delegate (or, in the same story as pop star Saga, an exploitative entrepreneur) who has limited control over his country’s commitments but who does what he can to grease the diplomatic wheels.

“I got this idea of these four characters and figured out how to sort of remix them each time,” Hudson said. “It’s really fun to do [that], to take your characters and rethink who they are in all these different ways. One thing you can do then is try to find these moments of opportunity and figure out where your characters swerve, and then figure out what that says about the different worlds.”

In a blurb for Our Shared Storm, the celebrated science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson wrote that Hudson succeeded in finding creative ways to explore those swerves and the worlds that led to them.

“Hudson has found a way,” Robinson wrote, “to strike together the various facets of our climate future, sparking stories that are by turns ingenious, energetic, provocative, and soulful.”

Negotiating the Future

The book’s futures are based on a set of climate-modeling scenarios called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or SSPs, which were developed by climate experts in the 2010s and used in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report in 2021. The scenarios range from “Sustainability,” in which aggressive climate goals are met and a more utopian future takes shape, to “Middle of the Road,” a continuation of current trends of inequality and consumption, to three more dire possibilities—“Regional Rivalry,” “Inequality,” and “Fossil-Fueled Development”—each of which would bring its own variety of high-level threats.

Hudson came across the SSP framework after starting the master’s degree program in sustainability at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation in 2017 and realized that it laid out scenarios for the future much in the same way that so much speculative fiction does, and in this case, with the explicit backing of scientific research.

“As soon as I read about [the SSPs], I was like, ‘Oh, these are science fiction stories,’” he recalled.

After visiting the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, which houses the SSP database, and meeting with scholars there to talk further about their research, Hudson realized that by writing five futures set in the same time and place with the same characters, he could eliminate variables and make it a kind of experiment.

“Originally,” he said, “a big part of the way I framed it as a master’s thesis was, ‘I’m going to do practice-based research to analyze my own experience writing these stories and figure out just how hard or easy it is to create literature based on scientific models and rigorous ideas about the climate.’”

Then, in December 2018, a member of his thesis committee at ASU, Sonja Klinsky, arranged for him to be part of the university’s observer delegation at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. Attending the conference, and thinking about the storytelling possibilities of a hypothetical climate event affecting that kind of event, helped him flesh out the book’s structure.

“When I talked with IIASA, we had thought, ‘How does each scenario handle a climate shock?’” Hudson said. “What could show how, [if]a superstorm hits, each scenario handles it differently based on the investments they’ve made?”

In the book, the storm is very strong and causes damage in each scenario, but local and global communities’ ability to deal with that damage—and the levels of suffering and violence that go with it—vary widely.

An Intellectual Journey and a Speculative Movement

Hudson grew up in St. Louis and moved to New York City to enroll at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in political science with a minor in creative writing. He also was the opinions editor for the The Observer, the award-winning student newspaper at the Lincoln Center campus.

“The Observer, doing the opinions page, writing a column—all those things definitely were steps on my intellectual journey … of being really keen on stories about arguments,” Hudson said. “And I think discovering that I liked talking to people about their writing was a big discovery that happened there.”

After graduating in 2009, he spent a year working as a journalist in India, where he had studied abroad as a Fordham undergrad, and when he got back to the States, he became a reporter at the St. Louis edition of Patch. From there, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he did freelance writing and political and nonprofit consulting.

In 2015, Hudson wrote an essay called “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk,” which laid out the practical implications of an aesthetic movement that portrays a utopian future in which solar energy is harnessed creatively to build beautiful, sustainable cities and communities. Like the dystopian cyberpunk genre before it, solarpunk is more than just an art movement—it was meant to portray real possibilities for how the world might look in the future.

When trying to define the term in the essay, Hudson wrote, “Let’s tentatively call it a speculative movement: a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability, and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.”

Hudson met, around that time, another writer and futurist thinker, Adam Flynn, who in 2014 had written an essay on solarpunk. The two co-wrote a short story, “Sunshine State,” that won the first Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest sponsored by ASU’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative. Seeing the work that was taking place there led Hudson to apply to the university’s sustainability master’s program, from which he graduated in 2020. In addition to his work as a fiction writer, Hudson has stayed on as a fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination’s Imaginary College, which partners with individuals and groups “advancing [the] mission of fresh, creative, and ambitious thinking about the future.” The college counts Robinson among its resident philosophers, along with other notable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.

And while Our Shared Storm began as his master’s thesis, with its publication by Fordham University Press, Hudson hopes that it can help a wider audience see that we still have options for what our climate future will look like.

Science Fiction as an Impetus to Action

While Hudson does believe that speculative fiction can help people imagine a brighter future, he said stories alone can’t save the world.

“I think they’re a necessary, if not sufficient, part of the process, [and] we need a huge tidal wave of mobilization that includes a huge amount of culture making. We’re going to need art. We’re going to need music. We’re going to need TV shows that do for solar panels what TV and movies did for cars back in the ’50s and ’60s, [making] car culture cool. We’re going to have to do that for these technologies of sustainability.”

But without massive organizing and political action, Hudson believes, “we could figure out how to communicate this to the public in a really effective way and still lose.”

Our Shared Storm touches on the conflicts that often arise when people and communities want to effect change—is it easier to accomplish goals through established political systems or through grassroots work that doesn’t rely upon state action?

Hudson has described solarpunk as a countercultural movement. “It should not be about the people in power,” he said recently. “It should be about the people who are not in power, who are sort of challenging those systems.” But after witnessing firsthand—and writing about—the geopolitical mechanisms that dominate spaces such as the annual COP meetings, he has come to appreciate the need to work within traditional political and diplomatic systems.

“I think learning how the institutions work—the national, local, and state governments that are trying to implement the treaties—and then kind of inserting yourself into those processes can be really powerful,” he said. “The stories are there to help people understand these dynamics and institutions, and help them get a little smarter about policy, get a little more strategic about where they put their efforts, [so they’re] not going to get taken for a ride.”

In Our Shared Storm’s most optimistic story, a strong labor movement is key to influencing government policy, and while he acknowledged that there is no one easy solution, Hudson believes that the working class uniting—and pushing for things like a Green New Deal through general strikes—has the potential to positively shape the path ahead.

So, with the scenarios laid out, and with some ideas about the actions necessary to avoid the worst-case ones, what kind of climate future does Hudson see us moving toward? That kind of prognosticating, he insisted, is not part of his project.

“What I was interested in was how we’re shaped by opportunities and material conditions,” Hudson said, harking back to his characters’ changing circumstances and swerving fates.

“All these things that I think end up shaping our lives—those were kind of the pivot points that I wanted [to show readers]. The point being that climate and the investments we make to deal with it are going to be a big factor in shaping those pivot points for billions of people.”

Zakelj, who earned a bachelor’s degree from the Gabelli School of Business in 2021, learned in October of his senior year that, due to the COVID-shortened football season, the NCAA would grant him and all other student-athletes an extra year of eligibility. This meant that Zakejl had the chance to play five seasons, instead of four—something that wasn’t initially part of his plan.

“I’ll be able to play for another year—while pursuing a master’s degree in the business school after graduating in May,” he told Fordham Magazine in fall 2020. “That’s something that I wouldn’t have been able to do, so I try to take it as a blessing in disguise, really. And my goal of getting drafted into the NFL is the same; it’s just pushed back.”

In addition to achieving his big postgrad goal, Zakelj will earn a master’s degree in business analytics from the Gabelli School this month. A four-year starter for the football team, he served as a 2021 team captain and helped the Fordham Rams’ passing offense finish 11th in the NCAA FCS division last season. He also became one of only 24 players in Patriot League history to earn All-League honors for all four years.

Joe Conlin, Fordham’s head football coach, told The Athletic that Zakelj’s football intelligence and approach to the game reminded him of current 49ers fullback Kyle Juszczyk.

“[Zakelj’s] one of the smartest football players I’ve ever been around,” Conlin said. “Nick and Kyle are very similar in how they approach practice and how they think about the game. Those guys just absorb it. It’s very important to them. He’ll take care of his body. He’ll be a great asset.”

Zakelj played offensive tackle in college, but NFL scouts have said he could move inside to play guard. NFL.com’s Lance Zierlein noted in his draft analysis of Zakelj that he “plays with athletic hands and feet in pass protection,” and is “agile and fluid in redirecting his weight and mirroring rushers.”

He joins former Fordham running back Chase Edmonds, FCRH ’18, in the NFL. Edmonds was selected by the Arizona Cardinals in the fourth round of the 2018 draft and, after four seasons with the Cardinals, signed with the Miami Dolphins this offseason.

That thought experiment was at the center of a Forever Learning Week lecture by Patrick Hornbeck, D. Phil., professor of theology and interim dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Fordham.

“What I want to talk about tonight is what Ignatius of Loyola would have to say about our particular moment, where it often feels like we are talking past each other,” Hornbeck said during the March 28 event, held online and sponsored by the Fordham University Alumni Association. He argued that “the Jesuit tradition equips all of us with skills and tools and opportunities to be human, even when we’re conversing with each other through the technology that we find ourselves with today.”

Hornbeck noted that Ignatius was no stranger to great advancements in communications technology: By the mid-16th century, the printing press had spread throughout Europe, democratizing the sharing of information in a way with parallels to the growth of the internet, he said.

He presented three quotes from Ignatius to help the audience imagine what kind of guidance the Spanish priest and theologian would offer if he were writing today.

‘Be More Ready to Justify Than to Condemn’

The first quote he shared is from The Spiritual Exercises:

“It must be presupposed that any good Christian has to be more ready to justify than to condemn a neighbor’s statement. If no justification can be found, one should ask the neighbor in what sense it is to be taken, and if that sense is wrong, he or she should be corrected lovingly.”

Hornbeck contrasted that idea with a social media environment in which people are quick to try to score points against strangers, often with an assumption that others mean the worst.

“The important thing here is he’s not saying, ‘Don’t judge,’” Hornbeck said. “He’s saying, ‘Don’t judge too quickly.’ He’s saying, ‘Don’t leap to judgment, don’t have a prejudice about what the person you’re speaking with might have to say.’

“And so, part of what Ignatius is inviting us to do is to see the person and to correct or to engage with or to disagree with that person as someone who is fundamentally a bearer of equal dignity as we are,” Hornbeck continued. “I think that what Ignatius is presuming in his presupposition, is this common, shared belief [that we are made] in the image and likeness of God, and if we can’t maintain that, I think that’s something that we all need to think quite a bit about today.”

Avoid ‘Excessive Fervor’

The second quote Hornbeck shared with the attendees is from a letter Ignatius sent to Jesuit scholastics in Coimbra, Portugal, in May 1547:

“Disorders in the life of the spirit arise not only from coldness of heart (ailments like tepidity), but also from overheating as where there is excessive fervour. … The philosophical dictum ‘Nothing in excess’ applies to everything, even justice itself. … When such moderation is absent, good is transformed into bad and virtue into vice, and many problems arise for those taking this path, blocking their basic purpose.”

“What Ignatius is asking us to do is to find something like a middle way or a middle path, not because we shouldn’t believe deeply in the things in which we believe,” Hornbeck said, noting that while sometimes decisive action is needed, it may not be appropriate in every moment. “It’s in this moderation and the pushing against the temptations or instincts that we have that we learn to become more fully ourselves.”

Cultivate Ignatian Indifference

The final quote Hornbeck offered is one from The Spiritual Exercises that speaks to the ways that any created tool—including the internet and social media—can be used for both positive and negative ends:

“The human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God Our Lord, and by so doing to save his or her soul. The other things on the face of the earth are created for human beings in order to help them pursue the end for which they are created. It follows from this that one must use other created things in so far as they help towards one’s end, and free oneself from them in so far as they are obstacles to one’s end. To do this we need to make ourselves indifferent to all created things.”

This passage describes a form of spirituality that “acknowledges that all that we have on the face of the Earth is neither good nor bad unto itself, but good or bad only as we use those things,” Hornbeck said, clarifying that the indifference Ignatius referred to was not the same as apathy, but “the sense of not being attached to something, not being convinced that a certain career or a certain way of life, or a certain standard of living is in and of itself good.”

“And so Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all of the other tools that we have at our disposal, I think Ignatius would say are neither good nor bad. It’s how we use them. It’s … deciding when to engage [and] in what kind of spirit we should engage.”

Toward the end of the event, moderator and Fordham University Alumni Association board member Jake Braithwaite, S.J., GABELLI ’11, GSAS ’15, raised a question about how Ignatius would handle deep disagreements not only with strangers online but also, say, at the Thanksgiving dinner table with loved ones.

“Ignatius was a man of very strong convictions,” Hornbeck answered. “And so my guess is Ignatius might have been quite feisty at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But I think that what he would encourage us to think about is how [to do] it while doing our very best to maintain our relationships—that we can gently, and without that kind of excessive passion that he was talking about, say, ‘You know, I just don’t see it that way,’ and then explain how it is.”

This event was part of Forever Learning Week, a series of free talks and tours featuring Fordham experts that is sponsored by the Fordham University Alumni Association.

The quotes from St. Ignatius Loyola used in this article are taken from the Penguin Classics edition of Ignatius’s personal writings.

By the end of 2019, just as the virus was starting to make headlines across Asia, Devine and his frequent collaborator and producer, Chris Bracco, had begun to talk about turning those songs into an album. In early March 2020, Devine went to Bracco’s house in Connecticut, where they recorded some of album’s foundational sounds. He then planned to go through his usual quick cycle: finish recording in April, mix the album in May, master it in June, tour in the fall.

Instead, once the public health crisis made clear that traditional recording and touring would not be possible for the foreseeable future, Devine found himself with a luxury he hadn’t experienced much over his prolific career: extra time. The head of his record label, Triple Crown Records, assured him there was no rush to complete the album, which left Devine with plenty of room to experiment.

“I’m sure we would’ve made a compelling record [in 2020], but I can guarantee you, we would not have made the record we made,” Devine says. “It was nice to get some distance and perspective and come back to it with fresh ears. And I think that afforded us the opportunity to thoroughly explore every little weird thought and idea we had.”

Those weird thoughts and ideas culminated in an album that finds Devine exploring an expansive sonic landscape, with a more lush, psychedelic sound than anything he’s done on his nine previous solo records, or in his work prior to that in the band Miracle of 86. Among the reference points he cites for the album are the Beatles’ White Album, Wilco’s A Ghost is Born, and Elliott Smith’s From a Basement on the Hill—all works filled with experimental touches built atop foundations of more traditional rock and pop songwriting.

“We knew this was something we wanted to be a little bit more textured, layered, swirly, creepy,” Devine says.

A Music Career Shaped by Time at Fordham

Devine grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island and started his first band, Delusion, as a teenager. That band would become Miracle of 86, which found some success in the punk and emo scene around the turn of the millennium, touring the U.S., Canada, and Europe, and releasing three full-length albums, the first of which—2000’s Miracle of 86 (Fade Away)—came out the November of Devine’s senior year at Fordham College at Lincoln Center.

Devine had enrolled at Fordham in 1998, where he double-majored in English and communication and media studies and lived in McMahon Hall for four years. He also wrote for and became features editor of The Observer, the student newspaper based at the Lincoln Center campus. While he took his studies seriously, Devine also used his time at Fordham to develop as a solo performer. He played shows around the city and on campus, and by the time he graduated in 2001, he had to decide whether to pursue a career in journalism or focus on his music.

In a 2012 profile of Devine in The Observer, Elizabeth Stone, Ph.D., the paper’s adviser during Devine’s time and still a friend of the musician’s today, recalled him telling her, “I have to give this music thing a shot. I’ll probably do something else in a year, but I’ve got to do this music thing. I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t.”

A year after graduating, Devine released his first solo album, Circle Gets the Square, on Immigrant Sun Records. The album was more personal and introspective than Devine’s work with Miracle of 86, and he continued to write and play solo shows while working day jobs. His next two albums, 2003’s Make the Clocks Move and 2005’s Split the Country, Split the Street, were both released on Triple Crown, and with them, Devine toured more extensively and grew his fan base by opening for acts like Brand New.

Since then, Devine has made a career as a prolific artist. In addition to his 10 LPs, he has released nearly a dozen EPs, several live albums, 12 split 7-inch records as part of his Devinyl Splits Series, and three albums as part of Bad Books, a project he started with Andy Hull of the band Manchester Orchestra. And over the years, along with numerous headlining tours, he has opened for artists like the Get Up Kids and Bright Eyes and played festivals like Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Lollapalooza.

While his path to music industry success differed from those of his peers who started touring widely as teenagers and forewent college, Devine says that his time at Fordham was an important part of his development not only as a person but as a songwriter.

“I feel like it was an immersive environment through which to learn ways to interpret and interpolate the world,” he says of his college experience, recalling a piece of journalism advice he got in a class with Professor Joseph Dembo: “Specificity breeds believability.”

“That’s something that is a big part of how I see the world and how I try to write,” Devine says. “To interrogate, to ask questions—I feel like that part of journalism continues to be a central aspect of what I do as a songwriter. If I had started [touring full-time] three years earlier, I would’ve missed what I got to do [at Fordham], and I actually think it would’ve had a detrimental impact on what I’ve done as a musician.”

Beyond academics and critical thinking, Devine says that he met many of his closest friends at Fordham, and he tries to visit the Lincoln Center campus at least once a year just to walk around or catch up with Stone over a cup of coffee.

“My experience at Fordham was formative and foundational in the sense that I feel like it furthered the project, in a very meaningful way, of exploring an idea of who [I am],” he says.

‘Navigating the Complexities of Personhood’

That exploration of the self is a central theme of Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong.

“What I think I’ve always tried to do,” Devine says, “is to try to capture what it was like for this person to be navigating the complexities of personhood at this given moment. That tends to be the project for me. Which is a fertile project, because I think being a person’s pretty complex.

“This record, I would say, is a lot of liminal subconscious examinations of pivot points in life, places where you are examining where certain defenses or survival traits may no longer serve you. The ways in which we could be trying to protect ourselves, but really [are] pushing people away. That weird dance on the head of a pin between, ‘What is a boundary that is healthy and what is me removing myself from things that are actually good for me?’”

And while none of the songs are overtly about politics or the pandemic, the album also grapples with how to make peace with oneself in a world of pain and suffering. When the album’s first single, “Albatross,” was released in January, Devine described it as “a hard reboot, a fragmented emptying-out for us strugglers whose life experience invalidates cookie-cutter solutions or miracle cures or 21st-century coping mechanisms.”

He is quick to point out that that “emptying-out” does not mean ignoring the suffering of others or forgoing responsibility for one’s actions.

“It’s not about an abdication,” he says. “Therapists talk about how guilt and shame are useless; wise remorse is actually a more fruitful way to move around in that which we have done, because it indicates a willingness to learn something and a way to detach from being completely self-lacerative. … What’s the most actionable philosophy to get through the day?”

Or, as he says about the meaning behind another album highlight, “Override”: “How do I get rooted while the Earth moves all around me?”

Staying Grounded and Returning to the Road

For Devine, staying rooted includes finding time to meditate and practice gratitude. He was raised Irish Catholic, and while he no longer considers himself to be a Christian, he says that his religious upbringing is “deeply embedded” within him and he still finds value in praying.

“Stopping in any given point in a day to say a few things for which you’re thankful and say a few things with which you’d like some help—that’s the guts of it,” he says of his prayer routine, adding that meditation gives him “five to 10 minutes a day where I’m separated from the noise of existence for that time.”

Another thing that grounds Devine—and that served as a point of reflection while writing the songs on Nothing’s Real—is being the father to a 6-year-old daughter, which he says is his “most important job.” When he begins a six-week U.S. tour in early April, it will be the longest he’s been away from home since his daughter was born, which he says has caused him some ambivalence, despite being excited to perform the new album’s songs in front of fans.

For many musicians, a return to touring after COVID-related cancellations will also mean a return to earning a living—something that has been difficult for artists who rely on playing shows to bring in income. Devine says that he has been fortunate not to face as much economic devastation as many of his peers, though, which has largely been the result of the Patreon subscription service he launched at the beginning of the pandemic.

“We’ve had such a miraculous success story with the Patreon,” Devine says of the service, which allows fans to pay a monthly membership fee in order to gain access to exclusive songs (both originals and covers), livestreams, discounts on merch, and more. “I have been really fortunate not to be financially ravaged by this, and it’s been almost [entirely] because of the Patreon.”

In monthly videos in which Devine answers submitted questions, it’s clear that he has a special relationship with his fans, who ask him everything from what inspired certain songs to what his favorite vegan meals to cook are. That loyal following is further shown by at least two people getting tattoos inspired by the new album.

Regardless of whether he continues to embark on tours as big as the upcoming one (“Maybe I’ll do it until I physically can’t. Maybe in five years, I’ll be like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’” he says), Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong proves that he has plenty of room to grow what has already been a long, successful career—one that has offered both him and his fans a chance to find communion in music during difficult times, something alluded to in a lyric from “Albatross”:

“If you’re sinking, sing along.”

Nothing’s Real, So Nothing’s Wrong was released via Triple Crown Records on March 25. Visit Devine’s website for tour dates and more information.

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.