Founders Dinner 2024

My Jesuit uncle Joe taught me this – The only way to show true gratitude for the gifts God has given us is to enjoy them.  Because you cannot be truly grateful unless you savor the gifts you’ve been blessed with.

And so we enjoy ourselves tonight – we celebrate the gift of Fordham and all that she has meant to us. We celebrate our beloved community, friendships new and old, the family we have chosen and built together. 

And we celebrate the deep joy of giving back. We look at the shining faces of the student scholars here tonight, all dressed up in their finest, full of talent and possibility, full of hope. We celebrate the enormous pleasure we receive from helping them. And we thank God for them.

Recently, I met one of the Founder Scholars you are helping to support. Salome Kufuor and her sister grew up in coal country, near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Their father came from Ghana and their mother from India, crossing enormous distances together, both physical and cultural. Together they worked hard and even started their own business – a convenience store in which their daughters worked.

Salome inherited their courage and determination, doing every leadership activity imaginable in high school. She also danced ballet for years (which I can tell you from childhood experience involves a fierce work ethic and willingness to endure terrible pain.)

When she applied for college, Salome had stunning credentials and many options. As with everything, she made this decision carefully, touring Fordham several times before committing. I asked her why she chose us. She told me it was the sight of “students like me walking around campus looking really happy.” Fordham offered her a scholarship that made her feel like all of the hard work of high school had paid off, and that her talent had been recognized.

Salome and I both started at Fordham recently. But in her first two years, she makes me feel like a slacker.

She is an honors student at Gabelli, majoring in Global Business, with a minor in one of our most competitive programs – Theater.

Salome speaks with determination, a comfort in her own skin well beyond her years. She carries the burdens of expectations on her shoulders, those moments of self-consciousness when she finds herself the only Black student in a class. But she finds the courage to speak up anyway, and the strength to study even harder, to be the most prepared in every classroom. 

That would be enough for most 20-year-olds to shoulder, but she’s also on a mission -- to carve out that first job and the career ahead. When Morgan Stanley or Citibank announce opportunity programs, she always signs up. She spends days shadowing leaders, to decide what kind of leader she will become.

As a Sophomore now, Salome imagines a future traveling the world for the first time, maybe going to graduate school, but definitely working for a Big Four bank. She’s kicking around the ideas of client management, or even HR leadership because she understands that both are all about people. She still has a few years to decide.

With all of that to shoulder, you would forgive her if she didn’t find the time to dig into the student experience. But she is also a profound part of creating our Fordham community. A tour guide with the Lincoln Center Society, she helps recruit the next generation of students. She is Secretary of the Caribbean African Society, welcoming students who also have immigrant parents, so that together they can glory in their cultures, hold onto what is precious. And she is the programming coordinator for the Office of Multicultural Affairs, because she knows how much we all have to learn from the glorious diversity of our experiences.

Oh -- and to make ends meet, she works part-time at the Gap.

It is a privilege beyond measure to invest in students like Salome – because of what they will achieve for the world, because of the joy it gives US to make a difference in their lives.

Salome, would you stand up and let us applaud you – on behalf of all of the students we honor tonight?

Fordham is full of students like Salome. It takes our breath away to watch them fall in love with learning and plan their futures with such hope. Their warmth, their enormous hearts, their blazing talent, inspire us every day.

For 183 years Fordham has taken in young people and helped mold them into alumni like you. Your careers have shaped the world. Your lives of integrity, your commitment to your families, and your compassion for your communities, have mattered to more people than you will ever know.

John Lumelleau, you came to Fordham as a student athlete – earning the chance to be here with the quality of your mind, and also with your determination and strength, your fearlessness and discipline. Those skills also brought you enormous success in your career. They have helped you create jobs and mentor so many.

It would have been enough to bask in what you earned through such hard work, but instead, you have spent your life paying forward those opportunities, especially to other Fordham student-athletes.

You married your beloved Loretta at Fordham, and for decades the two of you have done this work as true partners, modeling your values to your children and your community. She made it all possible. She made it all worthwhile.

John and Loretta know the power of athletics to teach as much outside the classroom as inside of it. They know what it takes to put aside ego and come together as a team. What it takes to wake up early in the morning and run around in the cold, even when you would rather do anything else. They know what it means to practice something over and over again until you achieve mastery. And they have made that possible for new generations. 

Bob O’Shea, descendant of generations of determined and hard-working people. When he became the first of them to go to college, also on an athletic scholarship, he carried the hopes and dreams and expectations of all of those generations on his shoulders. Running as fast as he could, quite literally, for Fordham and for the rest of his life.  He met his match in Michele – his best friend and partner since high school, through their years together at Fordham, and for decades since. Michele built their family and then bravely set out on her own – all the way to India – to find the inspiration she needed and could spread to others.

Together they have also invested in student-athletes – in opportunity and talent. They also created a remarkable mix of strategy, ambition and mission -- the O’Shea Center, which I need to tell you a little bit about.

From his own experience, Bob understood that business schools have a strange gap in their training – they fail to focus properly on credit analysis. Now I know that some of you sat up with excitement when I mentioned “credit analysis,” but I want to make sure the rest of you understand why you SHOULD feel excited.

Credit is the alchemy of opportunity. When we invest in someone’s idea, we fuel innovation. We create jobs.

Credit is also the lifeblood of our economy. In 2008, we discovered how much suffering results when credit dries up and the economy grinds to a halt.

With credit, like George Bailey in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, we invest in our community’s dreams.

The O’Shea Center teaches students how to analyze and manage credit. To do that at the highest level, Bob helped us hire the very best teacher in the world on this subject – the one who designed the training programs at Citibank and Goldman Sachs, Michael Gatto. (See Michael, I am getting to you after all.) Michael literally wrote the book on this subject, and I’m surprised Bob hasn’t made each of you take one home with a homework assignment -- he loves that book so much.

Michael brought his world-class knowledge about the subject to us – and not just that, his world-class knowledge about teaching to us.  He is part of Fordham’s work to reimagine business education.  No longer the competitive, cutthroat model, the kind that throws students in the deep end to see who survives, the kind that models a certain ruthlessness and selfishness. 

At Gabelli, we do it a different way. Michael believes in his students – all of them, not just the top of the class. He sparks their ambition with the power of his belief in them. He keeps lists of every student he has ever taught, and even every student who has come to one of his events. And for the rest of his life, he will answer their calls and help them navigate their careers.

And he chose to bring his genius to Fordham – a place full of grit rather than entitlement. For Bob and Michael, true business education also includes service trips to impoverished countries to build schools. To understand how much we have to learn from those who have the least – the wisdom and innovation born of necessity. To understand the profound joy – and responsibility -- of giving back.

Thank you for being here and helping give back.

Because tonight, we help launch Fordham into its next 183 years. Tonight, we remember that the trajectory of universities depends in large part on how much their alumni and supporters believe in them and invest in them.

Tonight we celebrate getting almost to the finish line of our fundraising campaign, one focused on scholarships for our students. We are 95% there -- and we welcome all of you who want the great glory of helping us make it across the finish line. (John and Bob and all of the other athletes in the room can tell you how good that feels.)

For 500 years, the Jesuits have embedded in us discipline and hard work. They remind us that our talents are gifts from God -- a responsibility to matter to the world. They push us and inspire us with a level of ambition and achievement that takes our breath away. 

And as we look out at a world full of turmoil, we realize that we have never needed Jesuit education more.

At Fordham, we teach our students to find their purpose in life, the meaning that will fuel their ambition to do good for the world.

At this moment when our students face futures full of uncertainty, Fordham teaches them courage – the determination to go out and make the world a better place than they found it.

At a time when the internet showers our students with disinformation, we teach students how to question assumptions and think critically. We help them avoid the frivolous distractions of modern life and focus.

And at a time when students feel fragile, exhausted by a world full of discord, we teach them to get stronger. We help them embrace growth and learn how to be challenged.

At Fordham, we teach Jesuit curiosity, the openness that allows you to admit when you are wrong, teaches you to seek out the argument on the other side, and forever fall in love with learning.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are here tonight because the world needs Jesuit education and the world needs Fordham.

Thank you.