Fordham News

What does it take to be a true leader in troubling times? Fordham Law School Dean Matthew Diller recently sat down with Tania Tetlow, Fordham University's new president, to discuss their own unique styles of leadership, the crucial role lawyers have in solving the hard problems of our democracy, and how to prepare law students for a career “in the service of others.” An edited and condensed version of this interview appears in the latest issue of Fordham Lawyer alumni magazine, but we wanted to make their full, wide-ranging conversation available to the entire Fordham community.

Just 26 years ago, President Bill Clinton signed the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act into law. Today, gay marriage is legal in all 50 states, and the idea that gender is more than a simple binary is gaining acceptance around the country. Efforts to lift up and support people who identify as non-binary are very much ongoing though, and so over the last few months, Fordham News spoke to members of the community who have had insights to share on the topic of gender, either because of their work, their personal experience or both.

The concept of artificial intelligence has been with us since 1955, when a group of researchers first proposed a study of “the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines.” At the same time, it seems like not a day goes by without news about some development, making it feel very futuristic. At Fordham, it’s the purview of professors from a variety of fields. Damian Lyons is a professor of computer science on the faculty of arts and sciences. R.P. Raghupathi is a professor of information, technology and operations at Gabelli School of Business. And Laurie Goldkind is a professor at the Graduate School of Social Service.

As summer arrives, and the trend lines for vaccinations and Covid deaths in the United States head in opposite directions, it feels like freedom is finally within reach. But let’s face it: The pandemic has taken its toll. We’re not the same people we were 15 months ago. So now, what? To help us use the lessons of the recent past to move forward in the future, we sat down with Kirk Bingaman, a professor of pastoral mental health counseling at Fordham's Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education .

On March 23  the Ever Given, a ship the length of the Empire State Building, ran aground in the Suez Canal, causing a traffic jam of epic proportions in one of the busiest shipping routes on the planet. When it did this, it revealed a $20 trillion sector of the worldwide economy that otherwise functions behind the scenes. The Ever Given was freed after six days, but Lawrence Brennan, a retired U.S. Navy Captain who served aboard the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier and now teaches admiralty and international maritime law at Fordham Law, said the snafu illustrates just how dependent we are on a system we often take for granted—one that has real vulnerabilities worth considering.

To say these are challenging economic times is an understatement. As Covid-19 vaccines are slowly being distributed, the promise of a revived economy seems closer than ever. Not so fast, though, as experts warn that life in the United States will probably not return to normal until the fall. And yet in spite of all of the uncertainty, entrepreneurs are still founding new companies. The Fordham Foundry, a business incubator based at the Gabelli School of Business, has continued to stage contests for burgeoning ideas. Its most recent one, the “Ram’s Den,” took place on February 6, and a second one, a pitch challenge geared toward less developed business plans, will take place on March 27. So what is life like for a small business owner these days? We sat down with Brandon Adamson, a Gabelli MBA graduate whose company Beauitmaps won the 2019 pitch challenge, and Ozzy Usman, a current EMBA student who won second place in this year's Ram's Den with his small business lending company Equiduct.

On January 21, 900,000 Americans filed new unemployment claims, adding to the 16 million who were claiming benefits at the beginning of the month, and a sign that the COVID-19 pandemic is still very much a threat to the economy. A second round of stimulus checks was issued by the Federal government in December, and a third round of checks is possible now as well. Closer to home, former presidential candidate Andrew Yang is hoping his embrace of universal basic income, or UBI, will help him become the next mayor of New York City. The idea behind UBI is that government sends every adult a set amount of money regularly, which ensures that when they enter the job market, they do so not from a level of destitution, but from a basic, secure level. Thomas Massaro, S.J., a professor of moral theology, has given all of this quite a bit of thought. He’s a frequent contributor to Catholicethics.com and the author of the 2018 book Mercy in Action: The Social Teachings of Pope Francis.

The vaccines are here! This month, residents of long-term health care facilities and frontline workers such as nurses and doctors began receiving the first COVID-19 vaccine approved by the FDA, and a second vaccine is expected to be rolled out in the coming weeks as well. That’s the good news. The bad news is, the coronavirus pandemic will still be with us until spring, as authorities work to distribute the vaccines to the nation’s 300 million-plus residents, some of whom may not be receptive to taking them. Just as the pandemic forced us to adjust to a reality that once seemed unfathomable, ending it will require a coordinated effort unlike anything we’ve experienced since World War II. Troy Tassier, a professor at Fordham who studies economic epidemiology, has been focused on the pandemic since it first struck the United States in March. He’s dismayed by the recent exponential rise in infections and deaths but says there are some lessons from the spring that can serve as a guide for going forward.

Dean McKay, a professor of psychology at Fordham, specializes in anxiety, obsessive compulsive disorder, and the connections between anxiety and disgust. With winter approaching and potentially leading to more isolation, we thought it would be a good time to talk to him about what we can do to cope effectively during what is likely to be a traumatic time.

The 2020 presidential election was always going to be challenging, and then the COVID 19 pandemic added a new wrinkle to the mix. Mail-in voting has been embraced as a way to keep voters safe from the pandemic, and although many States have successfully held elections via mail and vote, there are real questions about how to expand it to the rest of the nation. Monika McDermott, a professor of political science and the director of Fordham's Master's Program in Elections and Campaign Management, explains why it's essential that we make plans to vote right now.

On July 29 of this year, President Trump bragged on Twitter that he had "rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule," a reference to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which was passed by the Obama Administraton in 2014. With that, the issue of housing in American suburbs became an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign. Although the suburbs of today bear little resemblance to their cookie predecessors like Levitown, Long Island, they are still, in important ways, resistant to diversity and change. To explore why that is, and how it happened in the first place, we sat down with Roger Panetta, a recently retired professor of history at Fordham and the author of Westchester: The American Suburb, and The Tappan Zee Bridge and the Forging of the Rockland Suburb. He also co-wrote Kingston: The IBM Years, which came out in 2014.

Of all the honors a business professor might snag, an Emmy would seem to be one of the least likely. But Clarence Ball III did just that in 2014, when he won one for the documentary “Looking Over Jordan: African Americans and the War.” That same year, he joined the faculty of the Gabelli School of Business as a lecturer in communications and media management, and in addition to teaching communications theory and corporate communications, he has worked as the college’s interim director of diversity, equity and inclusion. We recently sat down—virtually, of course—with Ball, an award-winning competitive speaker and speech coach, to talk about we can better understand each other during these turbulent times.

Last year, a full 35 percent the United States population was 50 years old or older. And when it comes to jobs, crossing that Five-O mark brings some very unwelcome challenges. In 2018, a survey by the AARP found that nearly one in four workers 45 or older have been subjected to negative comments about their age, and 3 in 5 workers have seen or experienced age discrimination in the workplace. Carole Cox, a professor at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Service, has spent her career studying gerontology and social policy. Ageism remains the last form of discrimination that’s widely accepted in our culture, she says, and it’s critical that we overcome it if we want to grow and thrive as a society.

The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is probably best known for what is in the fourth and final section, which spells out the way the president of the United States can be removed from office if they’re alive but unable to fulfill the duties of the office. But the second section—which clarifies the process for replacing a vice president—is actually worthy of consideration as well, now that President Trump has become the third president in the country’s history to be impeached, and is facing a trial in the U.S. Senate. John D. Feerick, Dean Emeritus and the Norris professor of law at Fordham Law School, was instrumental in getting the amendment passed. In October, 1963, Feerick, then a recent graduate from Fordham Law, published an article in the Fordham Law Review on the subject, and just a month later, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, prompting members of Congress to revisit the subject. Four years later, in February, 1967, the amendment was passed. We sat down with him to learn more.

In this bonus track, Daniel Alexander Jones explains what the term Afromystical means, and why it's so important to understanding his alter ego, "Jomama Jones."

If you visit the Fordham Theatre webpage, you'll find classes with titles such as acting; theater history; flying solo; and young, gifted and black, all offered by one Daniel Alexander Jones. And indeed, if you sign up for these classes, Jones, a member of the faculty since 2008, will artfully guide you through your paces in these aspects of stagecraft. If, however, you visited the Connelly Theater, Joe’s Pub, or any of the myriad theaters where Jones has performed over the last decade, you’d have encountered a very different person: Jomama Jones. Since her debut in 2011, Jomama, a radiant soul diva with her own distinct backstory and career, has been a vehicle for Jones to explore profound questions of race and gender. In 2011, the New York Times described Jomama’s performance as “glowing, making it hard not to surrender to this sequin-encrusted earth mother’s soulful embrace.” And in 2015, Jones won a Doris Duke Artist Award, which featured a $225,000 unrestricted, multiyear grant. So what has Jomama been up to these days? Fordham News tracked Daniel down to find out.

These days, there’s almost no aspect of commerce that hasn’t been radically transformed by technology. Uber lets you summon a privately driven car to chauffer you, Seamless let you order takeout without ever speaking to a soul, and thanks to Airbnb, you can sleep in another person’s bed. But the shift to having everything at your fingertips at the tap of an app hasn’t been without its bumps. Ride-sharing apps have been blamed for worsening traffic congestion, Amazon has been accused of subjecting its warehouse workers to brutal working conditions, and Airbnb has been a source of great debate in places like New York City. To learn more about online marketplaces today, we sat down with Apostolos Filippas, an assistant professor of information systems at the Gabelli School of Business.

In 2016, more countries experienced violent conflict than any time in the previous 30 years. From Yemen, Syria, and Venezuela to Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ukraine, violence has become a more common answer to resolving disputes, and one of the consequences has been that more people are displaced around than globe since World War II. Needless to say, the world needs more peace makers. The United Nations is one organization that tries to fill the void; it currently maintains 14 different peace keeping operations, and mediates negotiations for many other conflicts. Anjali Dayal, an assistant professor of political science at Fordham says that as flawed as the U.N. is, it’s still an absolutely necessary bulwark against spreading chaos.

In 2009, Fordham and the FBI committed to bringing together the world’s best and brightest experts on law enforcement and computer science. Every 18 months, the International Conference on Cyber Security, or ICCS as it’s known, has convened leaders from academia, the private sector, and government to the University’s Lincoln Center campus. Past conferences have featured the heads of the CIA and the NSA, and this year’s gathering, which took place from July 22 to 25, concluded with remarks by FBI Director Christopher Wray. Anthony Ferrante, a former FBI agent who was director of cyber incident response for the National Security Council from 2015 to 2017 and is currently global head of cybersecurity and senior managing director at FTI Consulting, participated in this year’s panel “The Tipping Point: Cyber Risks to Election Systems.” Fordham News caught up with him during a break in the action.

The connection between criminal justice and brain chemistry can sometimes seem like science fiction, but it's very much a part of the court system today. In 2015, Fordham established the Neuroscience and Law Center, to explore how advances in neuroscience have prompted the legal profession to question long-held notions about criminal culpability, free will, thought, behavior, and pain. Deborah Denno, the center’s director and a professor of law, recently sat down with us to talk about her work with the center.