A Foreign Service officer prepares for her first diplomatic post

Sama Habib got her first lesson in diplomacy as a preschooler, not long after she and her family immigrated to the U.S. from Egypt.

“I was calling everyone to come and play, and all the kids looked at me like I was an alien,” recalls Habib, who was 4 when her family settled in Monroe, New York. “‘It’s not that they don’t like you,’ the teacher told me. ‘It’s just that they don’t speak Arabic.’ That’s when I learned that if I want people to play on the jungle gym with me, I have to learn to speak their language.”

This spring, Habib has been studying Spanish and U.S. immigration law at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, as she prepares to set off in August on her first diplomatic post—as a consular officer in Monterrey, Mexico.

It’s a career path she first glimpsed in 2010, right after high school, when she was selected for a State Department program that fosters transatlantic understanding. At Fordham, she majored in business and earned spots at a U.N. conference in Scotland and a seminar in Moldova on peace building in Eastern Europe.

She drew on her background to add depth to class discussions about the Egyptian uprising of January 2011, taking “an even-handed and fair approach to the region,” says Marcus Holmes, Ph.D., who taught international relations at Fordham.

After graduating in 2014, she earned fellowships that allowed her to work at the U.S. Embassy in London, earn a master’s degree in international affairs at Columbia University, and intern at the State Department and at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok.

Now she’s “primed and prepped,” she says, to pursue a diplomatic career made possible by her family’s emigration.

“For me to be doing what I’m doing now, not only as a woman but as a Coptic Christian woman, that just wouldn’t exist in Egypt,” she says. “The American Dream is why I’m here, and it’s why the Foreign Service speaks to me.”

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Christopher Dietrich, Ph.D., an assistant professor of history at Fordham, is at work on a biography of Bunche. It’s not the first, but he hopes it will bring to the fore new ideas about 20th-century politics, society, and foreign relations. Dietrich is one of five scholars nationwide to receive the 2016 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Junior Faculty Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, which he will use to do research toward the book, titled Tortured Peace: Ralph Bunche, Race, and UN Peacemaking.

“Ralph Bunche hated being identified as the first person of color to do things, but he was a trailblazer,” said Dietrich.

Bunche’s life as a scholar, diplomat, peacemaker, rights activist, and intellectual spanned the critical decades of the 20th century—from the 1920s to the 1970s. It was a time, said Dietrich, when tumult both at home and abroad ran high, and Bunche came to be at the center of new ideas about race and oppression as “probably the most well-known black person in the world after having won the Nobel Peace Prize.”

The Talented Tenth

Bunche had early aspirations to be one of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Talented Tenth, Dietrich said, a group of elite African-American scholars who could serve as thought leaders for their race. Following his graduation from UCLA in 1927 (he was valedictorian of his class), Bunche went to Harvard and became the first African American to earn a doctorate of political science from an American university.

Dietrich’s initial interest in Bunche arose from reading the scholar’s Harvard dissertation on African colonialism and the mandate system at the League of Nations. Bunche had done fieldwork research in French West Africa, and his analysis of colonialism, global oppression, and political systems was “strikingly radical” for its time, he said.

“His dissertation sits somewhere in between Lenin and the West in its critique of colonialism as an oppressive capitalist system,” said Dietrich. “He believed strongly in independence from colonial rule.”

At the same time, says Dietrich, Bunche’s overview in the 1930s was shaped by his radical belief that class trumps race in the fight to overcome oppression. “He believed in order for there to be a change in the political system, the white working class and black working class needed to form a coalition,” and that, globally, those under colonial rule no matter the race—Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Indians, and others—all shared a similar “self-aware spirit of hopefulness” that they’d be able to conquer racist systems.

“This is an African-American man saying this—someone who assigns Marxist economic tracts to his students,” said Dietrich. “It was radical.”

Bunche and the U.N.

Enter World War II. Already a well-respected Howard University professor, Bunche was summoned by the Roosevelt Administration to work in the Department of State, said Dietrich, as one of the nation’s leading experts on African-continent colonialism. He then became involved in the planning for the United Nations (to replace the League of Nations), and was instrumental in writing certain articles in the U.N. charter.

“Bunche presses for, and in fact partially authors, clauses in the charter that allow colonized peoples to make direct reports and demands [for ending colonial rule] of the U.N.,” he said.

Such work, he said, had a “quickening effect” on the process of decolonization around the world. From the U.N.’s founding in 1948 into the end of the 1970s, the member nations grew from the original 51 to more than 150—many of them African, Asian, or Middle Eastern former colonies that arrived at independence.

Nobel Undertakings and Civil Rights

As the visibility of race and globalism advanced, Bunche’s expertise was in high demand, said Dietrich. As the director and key player in the U.N. Observer Group in Palestine, he became the lead negotiator in the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict, implementing first a cease-fire and then the armistice agreement. For his peacekeeping role, he was awarded the 1950 Nobel prize.

When the Civil Rights movement came into its own in the second half of the 20th century, Bunche was a solid supporter, yet grew “deeply critical of the more radical side” of the movement, said Dietrich, due to his strong commitment to peacemaking. He locked arms with Martin Luther King Jr. in the Selma march and marched on Washington in 1963. But he grew disillusioned with certain activist and separatist factions and their leaders, including Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael.

“Carmichael famously said ‘You can’t have Bunche for lunch,’” said Dietrich—the suggestion being he was considered a lightweight by radical black activists.

Dietrich said Bunche continued working at the U.N., negotiating peace efforts in the Congo and being an outspoken critic against the Vietnam War, until his death in 1971.

“Bunche’s life was very particular to the mid-20th century and the major challenges facing the nation and world—whether it was civil rights at home or decolonization abroad,” said Dietrich. “Through his biography, we have a chance to see how somebody with a penetrating intellect and forceful presence navigated the great moments of his day when universal questions come into play—the tension between idealism and pragmatism, the work necessary to find justice and peace. These are some questions that are forever relevant to the human condition.”

The Fordham network of students, faculty, alumni, and community members promoting innovative solutions to these challenges is called the Social Innovation Collaboratory. This group has already sponsored workshops on three different themes, with more being planned. Each workshop allows students to apply their academic knowledge and passion for creating social value to solving a specific problem.

Members of the Clean Cookstoves workshop partner with the United Nations’ Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in an effort to reduce the economic, climate, and health risks of inefficient stoves and dangerous cooking methods used in many countries around the world. The Food and Enterprise students collaborate with Slow Money NYC to examine how to evaluate and rate local sustainable food and farm initiatives. And the Urban Mobility team focuses on enhancing BMW’s new electric vehicles to expand sustainable transportation options for college students and New Yorkers.

Students from all backgrounds have joined the three workshops—from freshmen to graduate students, business majors to psychology majors, native New Yorkers to international students.

Brendan Dagher, a Fordham College at Rose Hill senior, helped design all three of the workshops. He says the diversity is one of their greatest strengths. “It encourages the kind of integrated thinking that creates novel solutions to deep-rooted problems.”

Though some students have no previous experience in the area of sustainability, others, like freshman Olivia Greenspan, participated in local sustainability projects while still in high school. At Fordham, Greenspan is an active executive board member of St. Rose’s Garden, the Rose Hill campus’s community garden. In her first semester, she proposed using a method of hydroponics (growing plants without soil) that is already being implemented by the group.

And she’s expanding her sustainability focus from food to transportation by joining the Urban Mobility workshop. “Every time I get more involved with sustainability I just see more and more value in it, and I see how feasible it is with the technology we have,” she says. “I feel like if I don’t contribute, it just might not happen. And when I’m doing it, I feel like I’m part of a larger movement.”

Carey Weiss, Fordham’s director of sustainability initiatives and social innovation, leads all three workshops. She says that one of the best things about these projects is how students in each of the workshops divide into small teams where everyone is an equal partner. They brainstorm together, and they’re all encouraged to share their unique perspective. Graduate students learn from freshmen, English students learn from biology students, and so on.

Weiss says that this format allows the workshops to “draw on the students’ individual passions, and they bring their whole selves to the table.”

This model not only gives students an inside glance at leading organizations, it expands students’ opportunities for valuable networking. And, according to Weiss, it promotes new and innovative ways of thinking.

“It’s action-oriented, and it’s impact-oriented,” she says, “and it stems from the Jesuit idea of being men and women for others.”

This spring, Greenspan and the other Urban Mobility students will pitch their finalized concepts to the team at BMW, and the company will choose which ideas to implement.

Greenspan says that working with the team has been an enriching experience, both academically and personally.

She has also received several summer internship offers because of her involvement with the workshop. “I’m not just making connections between what I learn in my classes and sustainable solutions,” she says. “I also have constant access to these amazing companies and internship opportunities.

“And I have a real sense of what it’s like to work on a productive, kind, and caring team.”