About President Tetlow

Tania Tetlow

A Catholic who was born in New York and grew up in New Orleans, Tania Tetlow has deep family ties to the Jesuits and to Fordham, where her parents met as graduate students in the late 1960s. The first woman and the first layperson to be named president of Fordham University, she graduated cum laude from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American studies and is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where she earned a Juris Doctor degree and was a Harry S. Truman Fellow.

Prior to beginning her tenure at Fordham on July 1, she was the first woman and first layperson to lead Loyola University New Orleans, where she had served as president since 2018.

Under her leadership, Loyola successfully completed a turnaround after the most challenging period in its financial history. And when the COVID-19 pandemic took root in New Orleans in March 2020, she ensured the general safety of the Loyola community and a smooth transition to online and hybrid operations with minimal impact to finances.

Prior to joining Loyola, Tetlow served as the Felder-Fayard Professor of Law at Tulane University, where she was also senior vice president and a key strategic adviser to President Michael Fitts. As a law professor, her research helped persuade the Department of Justice to reimagine its regulation of constitutional policing. She also directed Tulane’s Domestic Violence Law Clinic, for which she raised millions of dollars in federal grant funds.

Before her career in academia, she was an associate at Phelps Dunbar, litigating complex commercial transactions. She also served as an assistant United States attorney, prosecuting cases involving everything from violent crime to fraud.