Norman C. Francis

Doctor of Humane Letters

A Jesuit-educated civil rights advocate and highly respected civic leader, Norman C. Francis has devoted his life to bridging racial divides, empowering students, and lifting up communities through the power of education and economic development.

For 47 years, he served as president of Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only historically Black, Catholic university. He nearly tripled enrollment during his tenure, expanded campus facilities, and enhanced Xavier’s academic strengths and student outcomes, particularly in the sciences. In the early 1970s, he co-founded Liberty Bank to provide economic opportunity to underserved New Orleanians. After Hurricane Katrina flooded the city and the Xavier campus in August 2005, he not only made good on his promise to rebuild and reopen the campus by January but also chaired the Louisiana Recovery Authority. He has been an advisor to eight U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush, who honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, calling him “a man of deep intellect, compassion, and character.”

Those qualities are rooted in Francis’ Jim Crow-era upbringing in Lafayette, Louisiana. Neither of his parents graduated from high school, but they worked hard to provide him and his four siblings with a Catholic education, a firm foundation in faith, and lessons that Francis has said have lasted him a lifetime: “Despite obstacles, respect yourself, respect others … and remember there is dignity in people at every level of work.”

He attended Xavier University of Louisiana on a work-study scholarship, earning a degree in mathematics, and in 1952 he became the first Black student accepted to Loyola University New Orleans College of Law. After graduation, he served in the U.S. Army before returning to Xavier as dean of men. He also put his legal education, informed by Jesuit principles, into practice: He represented Xavier students and others who were arrested while challenging racial segregation, and in 1961, he provided shelter at Xavier for Freedom Riders who had survived a firebombing in Alabama. In 1968, he became Xavier’s first lay and first Black president. Since then, he has led or been a board member of dozens of civic, religious, and educational groups—from the United Negro College Fund to the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. He has received numerous accolades, including the New Orleans City Council’s symbolically powerful August 2020 renaming of Jefferson Davis Parkway in his honor. Fordham is proud to present him with his 47th honorary degree.

For his moral courage and for embodying the principles of Jesuit education by creating avenues to a more just society, we, the President and Trustees of Fordham University, in solemn convocation assembled and in accord with the chartered authority bestowed on us by the Regents of the University of the State of New York, declare Norman C. Francis Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa. That he may enjoy all rights and privileges of this, our highest honor, we have issued these letters patent under our hand and the corporate seal of the University on this, the 20th day of May in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Twenty-Three.