We are pleased to provide you with an update to the University-Sponsored Travel Policy. If you recall, back in April 2020, Fordham suspended all University-sponsored travel in order to reduce the likelihood of a Fordham traveler contracting COVID-19 and inadvertently transmitting it to others. On July 1, 2021, in light of updated guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the New York State Department of Health, Fordham revised its University-Sponsored Travel Policy and relaxed its year-long suspension to allow for limited university-sponsored travel under certain conditions. With updated guidance and in consideration of evolving circumstances, Fordham is once again revising its University-sponsored Travel Policy.

Effective March 12, 2022, Fordham will permit University-sponsored travel under the following conditions:

International Travel

• Fordham may sponsor faculty, staff, and students to engage in international travel for educational purposes, research, or to fulfill professional responsibilities in the interest of the University, provided that such travel does not pose undue risk to the traveler’s health, safety or security, and sufficient University resources have been identified in cases where reimbursement for travel is expected.
• Fordham’s risk assessment for a proposed itinerary will depend on the countries that the traveler intends to visit:
  • Countries for which the State Department has issued a Level-1 or Level-2 Travel Advisory would not require pre-approval other than normal budgetary review.
  • Countries for which the State Department has issued a Level-3 or Level-4 Travel Advisory require more thoughtful consideration. At least ten days prior to the traveler’s critical decision date for proposed travel to a Level-3 or Level-4 country, the individual must submit an international travel request to Fordham’s International Travel Risk Assessment Committee (ITRAC). ITRAC will assess any specific risks associated with the proposed itinerary and then forward its recommendation to the traveler’s dean or vice president who will ultimately determine whether the proposed travel is pre-approved.
• Before engaging in pre-approved international travel, the traveler must be up-to-date with their Covid-19 vaccinations (and boosters when eligible) and enroll in both Fordham’s Travel Registry and the Department of State’s Smart Traveler Enrollment Program.  The University will continue to monitor conditions globally and notify travelers of emerging concerns should itinerary modifications be necessary.

Domestic Travel

• Faculty, staff, and students are permitted to engage in university-sponsored domestic travel (to locations within the United States and its territories) for educational purposes, research, or to fulfill professional responsibilities, provided that sufficient University resources have been identified in cases where reimbursement for travel is expected.
• While domestic travel for the above purposes does not require pre-approval from a dean or vice president, careful consideration and good judgment should be exercised prior to planning domestic travel.  The CDC has made available a helpful map to suggest what precautionary COVID-protocols are warranted on a county-by-county basis.
• Student clubs and organizations should continue to petition for domestic travel through the Office of Student Involvement for their respective campus.

Additional Considerations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• Fordham requires that all students, faculty, and staff are up-to-date with COVID-19 vaccinations (and boosters when eligible) prior to University-sponsored travel with rare exceptions.
• Travelers need to follow all CDC guidance and site-specific regulations including masking while on planes, buses, trains, and other forms of public transportation.  In addition, travelers must follow all destination-specific health-and-safety guidelines related to travel, testing, and quarantine.
• Before finalizing travel plans, one is encouraged to reflect upon the following questions:
  • Given the risk level for the specific sites I plan to visit, will I put myself or anyone in my household at undue risk of potential COVID-19 infection?
  • If I should contract COVID-19 while on University-sponsored travel, do I have a clear plan for how I could self-isolate and travel home safely?
  • Can my anticipated travel be deferred, or can I accomplish the work using videoconferencing or other remote means?

We wish you a healthy and productive spring semester.

Sincerely,

Dennis C. Jacobs, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
Marco Valera, Vice President for Administration & COVID-19 Coordinator

Her career got off to a fast start. A college internship at Black Enterprise Magazine led to a full-time job at CNN and several freelance magazine assignments after she graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 1997. By 25, she had sold her first novel to St. Martin’s Press. What should have been a wholly exciting time was mixed with turmoil.

“I thought I had to choose,” she says. “It was either my job at CNN or being an author; I told myself I couldn’t do both.”

So Reid quit her job and tried to make a living as an author. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Miami. And for a while things went well.

She created a lot of buzz around her third book, Marry Your Baby Daddy, a novel in which three sisters will inherit their grandmother’s fortune only if they marry the father of their children no more than six months after reading the will. In keeping with the theme of the novel, Reid started hosting Marry Your Baby Daddy Days—group weddings intended to promote two-parent homes in urban communities—which received plenty of media coverage, including interviews with major news outlets and the likes of Soledad O’Brien.

But “publicity didn’t pay the bills,” Reid says, and it became harder for her to support herself financially.

She decided she needed a reset. On a whim, she applied for a teaching position in the United Arab Emirates. She got the job.

From 2013 to 2014, Reid lived in Abu Dhabi, where she taught English to oil and steel industry employees and took the time to reconnect with herself. It was there that Reid says she realized “having a job is self-care,” because it allowed her to pursue her creative endeavors without having to worry about how she was going to support herself.

“Being there gave me time to be alone, but not lonely. To rest, to develop the discipline to work a 40-hour work week and also write. It gave me the space to reinvent myself and experiment with my ideas.”

On the weekends, Reid spent time with other women who had formed a local writers group, and she started working on a new novel, later published as This Life. She also joined an entrepreneurial women’s group in Dubai. “We would keep each other accountable, share ideas, and get feedback before going out to experiment,” Reid says.

In 2015, about a year after moving back to the United States, she found a local support network in the form of the Fordham community, which she reconnected with during a Yankees spring training event in Tampa, Florida. Now she’s a member of the Fordham University Alumni Association’s advisory board, focused on networking and engagement. She’s also a regular contributor to Forbes, where she has published articles on topics such as workplace diversity and wellness, and has been a content strategist at a major New York City-based investment bank.

“Fordham always felt like a community, always provided a safety net of support for me,” says Reid, who transferred to Fordham as a sophomore. She credits her professors for helping her develop her voice as a writer and says the University’s Jesuit culture made Fordham “a place where I could reflect and renew.”

“I knew I could always connect with people from my past and they would be a catalyst for my future,” she says. “Now I feel I can use the voice I developed there to add value and be a more active part of that community.” 

Fordham Five

What are you most passionate about?
I am most passionate about growing my spiritual foundation and my connection to God. It’s not really a thing I do, it’s more of a feeling or listening thing. And I’m always trying to develop a more consistent discipline around that.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?
My driving instructor told me to “stay in my lane,” and I followed that advice and now apply it to everything. It’s not that you have to choose either/or. But when I notice that I’m starting to get drained, I know then I’m doing too many things at once and I have to figure out what to focus on and finish. It helps maintain a sort of stability in my core so I can do both, so I can stay focused, so I can hold on to more in life.

What’s your favorite place in New York City? In the world?
Being born and bred here, I’ve seen it all. I’m not fascinated by any place in New York City.

My favorite place in the world is poolside at the Shangri-La in Abu Dhabi. There’s a beautiful view of the Grand Mosque. And they have awesome pool service.

Name a book that has had a lasting influence on you.
The Writings of Florence Scovel Shinn. It’s a compilation of all her work. From her book, I learned how much power I have—not only as a woman but just being born, that being here makes me a powerful person, and I don’t need anything else. I read it in 2004, and looking back later on it reminded me that being in itself is enough, being born fulfilled my purpose, and I’m powerful because of that. That has brought me clarity and peace in some challenging situations.

Who is the Fordham grad or professor you admire most?
Elizabeth Stone. She’s a tough professor; she isn’t sugary and sweet. I liked that. She gave me good critiques, things to think about, good advice about my work. I trusted her opinion. And she helped me land that first internship, which helped me land my first published piece. She saw that I was talented and she trusted me enough to vouch for me. I will always remember that.

“Antarctica was just completely covered in snow and ice,” Flynn says. “I didn’t really think about [it]before going, but of course the sun is going to be reflecting off of all of this.”

The blindingly bright glare of the sun was just one of the remarkable things Flynn recalled about her three-week journey to Antarctica, the Falkland Islands, and South Georgia as a Lindblad Expeditions and National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow.

The fellowship, awarded to pre-K–12 educators who have shown a commitment to geographic education, sends recipients across the globe on Lindblad Expedition ships in order gain field experiences that they can bring back to their classrooms and institutions.

Flynn, who earned a master’s degree in biological sciences at Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, is the STEM initiatives program director for the Long Island Children’s Museum, where she has worked since 2016. In her role, she teaches informal education programs for elementary and middle schoolers, mentors teenage volunteers in creating sustainability and nature programming, leads an after-school program for high school girls to encourage an interest in STEM fields, and runs citizen science programs, among other duties.

In the summer of 2018, after completing National Geographic’s educator certification training, she discovered that she was eligible to apply for numerous grant and professional development opportunities through the organization, including the Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship.

“I applied knowing that it was very competitive, and thinking that it was kind of like a practice run,” Flynn says. “I would apply for it and then I would get feedback and apply again.”

Instead, she got the news that she had been accepted for the 2019 fellowship cohort.

Embarking on a Fantastic Voyage

Along with the 44 other members of her cohort, Flynn provided her preferences for destinations and scheduling, and from there, she was assigned to the National Geographic Explorer and headed for some of the southernmost reaches of the Southern Ocean. To prepare for their voyages, Flynn and the rest of the 2019 fellows participated in a multiday, hands-on workshop at the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, D.C., where they learned skills like photography and video editing and gained tips on outreach planning and public speaking.

After flying from New York to Miami, from Miami to Santiago, Chile, and finally from Santiago to Stanley, Falkland Island, on November 10, Flynn and the rest of her shipmates began their journey at sea. She was joined on the ship by one other fellow—an environmental science teacher from Miami—as well as paying tour guests and a staff of naturalists from varied backgrounds, including marine biologists, historians, geologists, and a guest speaker, Andrew Clarke, a retired polar ecologist from the British Antarctic Survey who discussed the effects of climate change on the area.

In the Falkland Islands, which is above the Antarctic Convergence and therefore has a relatively mild climate, Flynn saw flora and fauna that looked more familiar to her, including cows and sheep that were right alongside penguins.

When the ship reached its next stop, South Georgia, Flynn and her fellow explorers were able to get even closer to the wildlife there.

“South Georgia is covered in the most incredible mountains that you’ll ever see,” Flynn says. “And the wildlife that we saw there was amazing, in terms of the different kinds of animals that we saw, but also in terms of their number and how close you got to them.

“For instance, [the]penguins don’t have any natural land-based predators, and so they’re intensely curious. So if you just sit down, they’ll come right up to you. They’ll peck at your jacket and things like that. So, the ability to get so close to animals and really observe them in their natural environment was amazing.”

From there, the travelers made their way to the final part of the tour, Antarctica. Aside from the intensity of the reflected sunlight, Flynn says she experienced a landscape—and a seascape—unlike anything she had seen before.

“The colors that you could see in the ice were unexpected,” she says. “The water looked almost tropical because of how clear and blue [it]was. As you’re standing on the bow of the ship and just kind of going through the water, you could hear all of the crackling of the ice, which was really cool.”

A Close Look at Climate Change’s Effects

Of course, the trip was also an opportunity to observe the troubling effects of global warming in these places. Because the ship makes a similar trip every year, Flynn says that staff members described a front-row view of the changes.

“The captain of the ship has been with that ship [about]15 years, and he said that he’s seen noticeable changes in the past 15 years—where they can go and when in the season they can go,” Flynn says, noting that South Georgia’s Neumayer Glacier is receding two meters every day, according to representatives from the South Georgia Heritage Trust who spoke to the ship’s passengers.

Flynn says that the increase in annual temperatures has also created worries about biosecurity on South Georgia, which has seen devastation to native species because of the increasing hospitability to invasive species that find their way onto the island, including rats and reindeer. Before leaving the ship and setting foot on the island, she and the other passengers had to clean off their clothes, bags, and shoes to ensure that not even a single foreign seed or blade of grass made it onto land.

“[We had to] use a screwdriver or a paperclip to take out every single little piece of dirt,” Flynn says, adding that inspectors would check everyone before allowing them to exit the ship and would turn them around if they hadn’t cleaned off well enough.

That kind of experience is something that Flynn knew would be important to share with the students she works with at the Long Island Children’s Museum.

“My feeling going into this expedition was to ask as many questions as I could and try to figure out ways to talk to kids about climate change without it being ridden with anxiety. So as I’ve come home, I’ve been trying to figure out ways that I can disseminate information, but also have it be hopeful.”

Bringing Exploration’s Lessons Home

The sharing of information with students is an essential component of the Grosvenor Teacher Fellowship. The National Geographic Society requires fellows to provide regular reports during their two-year commitment as program ambassadors, during which time they’re expected to develop a student-action project inspired by the expedition, share the project plan as a resource for other educators, and organize a public event that connects their experiences to the larger community or their professional network.

Flynn is planning an exhibition, titled “Slow Down! Explore … A Journey to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and Antarctica,” that is scheduled to be on display at the museum from April to June.

“In regular life, it’s very hard to find time to just kind of be,” she explains. “And I felt like on this expedition, I wasn’t the one who is responsible for planning anything. I could just watch the albatross, and I could just look at the elephant seals fighting. You notice a lot more. I felt like I wanted that to be a big component of this exhibit, because I feel like kids don’t have the luxury really of doing that.

“So, we’re going to focus on what it means to be an explorer and how to build curiosity, and the fact that you have to slow down a lot in order to observe or experience certain things. And that oftentimes travel is a way to expand your horizons and to discover new things.”

For Flynn, who had the opportunity to live in France for a year as a Fulbright scholar after her undergraduate studies at Adelphi University, her trip as a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow was filled with things to be discovered, experienced, and observed that were unlike anything else she’s encountered in her life’s travels.

One moment that stands out to her in particular involved an early wake-up that was worth every bit of sleep deprivation.

While in South Georgia, an expedition leader told the group they needed to get up at 3:30 a.m. to go to a place called Gold Harbour, where he promised they would see the most amazing sunrise of their lives. On the first day they went, there was so much fog that none of the colors of the sky were visible. The group was glad to get to observe wildlife at that moment in the morning, Flynn says, but there was some obvious disappointment.

Luckily, a few days later, the leader told them that the next morning, they’d have another chance to catch the Gold Harbour sunrise. This time, there was no fog, nor any disappointment.

“We went and it was the most incredible thing that I’ve ever seen,” Flynn says. “There [were]penguins walking across the beach, everything was bathed in this amazing light, and the sky changed colors from minute to minute. Everyone is so quiet and just kind of absorbing everything.

“You don’t really want to get up at three o’clock in the morning, but you think, ‘When am I going to be back here again?’”

The Lincoln Center campus will reopen for evening classes at 5 p.m. today following a water main break and street flooding at Broadway and 62nd Street in Manhattan. Ram Van service to Lincoln Center will resume at 4 p.m. We anticipate the Lincoln Center campus opening on its normal schedule on Tuesday, January 14.

The decision to reopen is based upon consultation with New York City Emergency Management regarding the resumption of water service to campus via the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and the resumption of steam heat to several buildings either via ConEd or emergency boilers. Temperatures may be cooler, though still safe, in certain buildings (likely Lowenstein Center, 140 West 62nd Street, and Martino Hall) while steam service is being restored. Students, faculty, and staff are advised to bring an extra layer of clothing to campus this evening and tomorrow.

The Quinn Library will reopen this evening as a study space only; the Law Library will be open and fully staffed.

As always, members of the University community should take local conditions into account when traveling to or from campus. Faculty, students and staff should call any of the following numbers for the latest campus travel-related information:

(718) 817-5555
(212) 636-7777
(800) 280-7669 [(800) 280-SNOW]
(877) 375-4357 [(877) 375-HELP]

In an emergency, please call Fordham Public Safety at (718) 817-2222.

UPDATE Monday, January 13, 2020 | 10:05 a.m.

The Lincoln Center campus will remain closed today because of a water main break and street flooding at Broadway and 62nd Street in Manhattan. The campus may reopen for evening classes. Public Safety will notify the University of any status changes as we have them.

As always, members of the University community should take local conditions into account when traveling to or from campus. Faculty, students and staff should call any of the following numbers for the latest campus travel-related information:

(718) 817-5555
(212) 636-7777
(800) 280-7669 [(800) 280-SNOW]
(877) 375-4357 [(877) 375-HELP]

In an emergency, please call Fordham Public Safety at (718) 817-2222.

Monday, January 13, 2020 | 6:55 a.m.

Because of a water main break and street flooding at Broadway and 62nd Street in Manhattan the Lincoln Center campus will delay opening until noon today. The NYPD is diverting street traffic in the area, and one or more subway lines to the 59th Street Station and other local stations has been suspended.

As always, members of the University community should take local conditions into account when traveling to or from campus. Faculty, students and staff should call any of the following numbers for the latest campus travel-related information:

(718) 817-5555
(212) 636-7777
(800) 280-7669 [(800) 280-SNOW]
(877) 375-4357 [(877) 375-HELP]

In an emergency, please call Fordham Public Safety at (718) 817-2222.