State of the University 2024

I have been asking the new people who join Fordham what they notice about us -- trying not to seem too eager for praise. They all comment on the remarkable warmth of this community compared to where they’ve been. The loyalty of people who have worked here for decades, some of whom are the children of parents who worked here for decades.

They marvel at the sense of common purpose.

They also notice that we are not immune from the malaise hitting higher education. Especially for those of us who joined the academy at a time of seemingly endless growth, we feel the current decline more keenly. COVID also exhausted us all and we can’t seem to get a moment to catch our breath.

This past year, we have been asking all of you for insights. I have been listening, hard.

You describe love and loyalty for Fordham. You also yearn for more of what makes us special – more community, more purpose. Sometimes expressed in the language of what has been lost, other times expressed in hope for the future.

What I heard from so many of you is that we bask in a special warmth, but one fractured by divisions. Between campuses. Between faculty and staff. We put up fierce silos. We suffer the distance between work and long commutes. Many of you miss the presence of those with the autonomy to work from home.

You describe the beauty of a relational culture where work happens among people who know each other well, willing to pick up the phone to ask about health and family in addition to the task at hand. But you also describe old-fashioned business practices. Decentralized technology and systems that don’t talk to each other. Exhausting inefficiency.

You revel in the global reach of New York, the city’s sense of urgency. But you also describe the contrast between that global scope and Fordham’s inward focus. The glory of our deep traditions that also sometimes mire us in the past.  The constant temptations of orthodoxy.

We excel and achieve excellence, you proudly say, but we have allowed parts of our enterprise to decline.

As we await the results of our compensation study, we know that even top national salaries do not stretch very far in this painfully expensive city. For those who spent their lives yearning for a tiny apartment in Manhattan that opens up to the whole world, it is a tradeoff well worth it. But for many of you who do not have time for theatres and museums, who struggle with expensive housing and long commutes, it may not feel worth it.

And we in higher ed increasingly feel under siege. Those who once bragged about us as a marvel of American achievement are now quick to criticize and question our motives. We get reamed for failing to protect free speech -- and for failing to curtail speech – often by the same people, in the same breath.

For decades, we were one of the only institutions in which Americans maintained trust. But that trust has cratered, all within the last few years.

We spend more of our time in crisis – not just the turmoil of last year but the slow-moving crises. Of opportunity and affordability. Too many poor kids with perfect SATs and 4.0s go to community college. Too much talent is squandered. And instead of helping us bridge those gaps, politicians have falsely questioned the value of education altogether.  Politicians who would never dream of pulling their children out of college urge other people to do so.

Just at the moment when the global economic competition has become more knowledge-based, we are pulling back from higher ed as a public good. Disinvesting from the most important part of our future.

The FAFSA form debacle became one more kick in the shins for American families struggling to afford opportunity.

Not since the GI Bill has the percentage of Americans going to college shifted so dramatically, but this time, it’s in reverse.

For us at Fordham, we feel those external pressures, but we devote ourselves to the work at hand. We educate the students in front of us – those bright shining faces that fill us with hope.

But even there, the work of teaching students has gotten harder.

Some of you have expressed worry to me that our students are less prepared – and while our standards have not changed, we know this entire generation has taken a hit to its level of preparation. Young people lost so much to the pandemic.

What does it mean to educate this generation?

We have also been listening hard to our students too, and studying the research.

They are resilient and strong, but they are increasingly depressed and anxious. They have reason to be. 

They grew up doing terrifying drills preparing for school shootings, which we assure them are rare, but they keep happening with horrifying regularity. 28% of Gen Z have personally experienced gun violence and half say they think about mass shootings weekly.

They watch the planet falling apart, risking the future of the whole human race. 

They expressed outrage at racial oppression, experienced a year of hopeful progress, and then witnessed the fierce backlash.

They feel injustice keenly, but they’ve also been taught an individualism that fails to build bridges of empathy.  Too often they believe that “my suffering negates your suffering” instead of “my suffering makes me understand your suffering.”

From childhood, they’ve been steeped in a social media culture that rewards jumping to conclusions. That presents only news you agree with and flattens complexity into a meme. They were raised in an atmosphere that encourages self-righteousness instead of openness. Insults instead of persuasion. Assuming bad intentions of those who disagree with you.

Gen Z is optimistic about their ability to make a difference, but not about our desire to help them. They have reason to feel betrayed.

Fordham students are remarkable, and they still lean toward hope.  But they also have reason to be cynical. We have to spend far more time earning their trust. Helping them get stronger, with empathy not criticism, but without coddling them. We have to catch them up on the years they lost.

And just when they need us most, we are so very tired.

Future

How do we manage all of this?  What can we do at Fordham to find hope?

My Uncle Joe, a Jesuit about to turn 94 next month, has something he always tells me. “The answer to the crisis can be found inside the crisis.”   For us, I think, that means using the tools the Jesuits have taught us, the superpowers they give us, especially the great gift of discernment.

We cannot immunize ourselves from the divisions and pressures of the outside world, but we can build something more beautiful here.

I tell the students at orientation – individually, none of you has much power to impact the quality of our student community. But collectively, you have all the power. The same is true for us. As individuals, none of us – including me – can move this enormous ship, but collectively we have all the power.

We have something so precious here – a place that nurtures them and us.

If we try, all of us, we can come together beyond our divisions and model a different way for our students.

We can be brave and kind enough to assume good intentions of each other. To take the leap of faith of believing that we do care about each other, even when we disagree.

We can model for the students how to listen intently, with openness and curiosity, and avoid jumping to conclusions.  (Boy is that hard.)

We can focus on the greater good. Even as we fight for our own corner of the university – as we should – we also know that we can never flourish without caring about the whole. We will survive only if we fight for Fordham, not just fight each other.

And we can keep striving for excellence, in everything we do, because that’s who we are.  We work hard because the students fuel us. Infused with possibility and enthusiasm, they give us hope.  This – this dream – is what we signed on for when we came here.

What if we – Fordham – became known for being forward-looking, infused with the urgency of New York, and the ambition of the Jesuits?

We know that the path forward means focusing on the promise of what makes us special.

What do we promise? I’m not talking about the tag lines here, but the answer you give your friends when they ask about sending their children here. This is some of what I heard from you --

“We teach students to operate on a world stage without losing their souls.” 

I don’t know if we could use that in marketing materials, but doesn’t that sum it up? 

For a lonely generation, we offer community, warmth, and meaning.

For a generation with reason to worry about its financial future, we provide academic excellence, and the unparalleled opportunities of New York.

Strategic plans need to be achievable and tactical, but they also need – as you keep reminding me – an ambitious vision. Not just a statement of what we do now (along with hundreds of other schools) but a direction in which we are going. A way we can stand out.

What if we tried to become the first choice for students who want to matter to the world?  Not through any gimmicks, but by doubling down on who we are. By executing better and keeping our promises.

Because we are in the capital of the world. Because we can stand out for connecting students’ passions to the pragmatic.  In true Jesuit fashion, we can fill our students with a sense of purpose, but not just that –  also the skill and discipline to make a difference. We can hang on fiercely to our academic fundamentals – because they teach the most essential skills and they also teach character– while still aiming our curriculum toward the future.

The only way that Fordham is clearly in a category of one is our age-old bragging right --

We are the Jesuit University of New York.  Let’s not pivot to something different – but deliver on our promise.

Process

I want to talk about the strategic plan, starting with process. 

As a law professor, I always loved the ways our law faculty meetings focused more on the process of deciding than the actual result of the decision. It’s one of our more endearing traits as lawyers. Process matters, and here we use the process of discernment.

Discernment is about listening, in an open and radically participatory way. We have done that – through elected bodies like the Faculty Senate and Administrator’s Council, and more broadly through planning sessions, online forms to make it easy, and group gatherings where we could exchange and thus improve our ideas. More than a thousand of you gave us input.

We started our work at last year’s State of the University, with my attempt to give us a direction in which to head.  From there, you put flesh on the bone.

I know that process issues tend to give us fits. There is a temptation – one I have felt often – to feel consulted only if you are individually asked. If you’re feeling that, please consider this the ask. I am asking for your help, each of you. If you have amazing ideas, share them with us.  (Or else you forfeit the right to criticize your colleagues’ ideas.)

There is also a temptation to feel truly consulted only if no one consults those with different status. I hope that’s not true for any of you because that’s just not how we roll.

In proper discernment, we looked at data, especially retention data. We did, for the first time in Fordham’s history, market research. We asked prospective students what they knew of us, but we also asked members of our community, and had an overwhelming response.

This spring, we hired a facilitator to help us in the work of listening. He has summarized those sessions in a presentation we will post online.  But that facilitator is not writing the plan. We put together a coordinating committee to help us gather information and data, but that committee is not writing the plan. This is an iterative process where we will take in what we hear, structure it, and then send it back to you to keep improving and building on it.

I know that I have worried some of you by not doing the traditional higher ed process – with a properly representative committee, one that often balloons to enormous size in a failed attempt to represent every constituency. A committee which is then charged with the impossible task of writing a report that doesn’t read as though it was written by a committee.

If you go online to read other university strategic plans, you’ll see the predictable results. They often list every single thing the university does as a strength, lest they offend. They gain consensus by establishing the top 237 priorities of the university. And they all say the same thing.

Tomorrow I’ll send you a document that provides a framework of where we are in the strategic planning process so that you can give us more specific feedback. It is an unusual document to share with thousands of employees –an honest diagnosis of the problems we face and opportunities we build upon. It has the beginnings of the ideas that all of you came up with, tinkered with, and improved. Many of them will seem obvious – because there are obvious things we must do.  All of them will get better with your help.

And for any of you tempted to fret about which favored few were tasked with writing the document, you’ll soon be able to tell by reading it, it was just me. It is not eloquent, just meant to describe where we are right now so that we can keep working together. As we continue to build structure, it will be much easier to give real input.

True discernment builds consensus, but that does not mean unanimity. It would be profoundly unfair to grant veto power to each and every one of us. But every idea written down thus far is just a placeholder until we find something even better.

Diagnosis

The framework document starts with diagnosis, and a detailed list (though necessarily incomplete) of strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.

Here is the good news, and I’m going to focus on undergrad for a moment.

Fordham is among the top few private universities in the country in the number of undergraduate applications we get each year.  In the 95^th percentile. According to our market research, our popularity is driven by New York and our reputation as a warm and nurturing community.

We are so popular that we compete above our weight class with far wealthier institutions, with more prestige and status.

The bad news is – we don’t do very well in that competition. Students are intrigued with us, but don’t say yes. Our yield, as it is called, is only about 10%. That puts us in the bottom 9^th percentile. It is a weakness that will continue to make us vulnerable.

Why is our yield so low? We ask the students who turn us down. Four out of the five top reasons they give are price. Less prestigious schools keep themselves more affordable. Worse, wealthier schools outbid us on financial aid.

This will not be easy for us to fix. We are almost entirely dependent on student income and we spend every dollar we take in – mostly on people. We are taking a hard look at our financial aid strategy and eagerly fundraising for scholarships.

But there are two other things we need to focus on:  telling our story better, and actually getting better.

Thanks to Marketing and Communications, we are making huge progress in telling our story better – with far better strategy. And there is such a good story to tell.

As just one example, we realized from our market research that when we recruit students, we waste too much time mired in complexity. Before we even talk about Fordham, we start talking about choosing a campus.

You’ll see us – with your help – start to focus the elevator pitch. To sell Fordham, one Fordham, which means reveling in both campuses.

But marketing only goes so far.  I am afraid there is no substitute for also improving quality.

Standing Out

The way we stand out, the way we will always stand out, is as The Jesuit University of NY.

I don’t mean the tagline,  I mean how we distinguish ourselves from a crowded marketplace.

What if we did more to deliver on our promises?

We can become more Jesuit, by centering our students and improving their outcomes. We can better embody a full university in the breadth of subjects we teach and research we do. And we could grasp the breathtaking opportunity of New York. Let me go through each of these.

First, being Jesuit is our identity, our value proposition, and most importantly, the entire point of the enterprise. The Jesuits built Fordham and entrusted it to us.

It is a profound and special gift. As Malcolm Gladwell said, it remains “breathtakingly relevant” today, even at 500 years old.

Our Jesuit identity gives us such credibility. Not just for focusing on social justice (because luckily, many institutions care about that) but also for the caliber of our research and academic excellence, for the profound nature of our teaching, for the ways we wrap students in services, and focus on mind, body, and spirit.

That reputation, however, is fading.  Fewer people know who we are and what we stand for. More institutions have begun saying all the same things. We are going to have to explain ourselves better.

In the market research, 29% of our students told us they came in part because we are Jesuit. 37% came despite that, though many of those fall in love once they get here. And the rest (30%) have no idea what it means.

Given that, why double down?  Because this is not a time to blend into the background of higher ed by diluting our identity. We are not trying to be all things to all students – we need to stand for something and find our students.  Otherwise, we’re just another school in a very crowded market.

And we know, when we look at the research on Gen Z, that Jesuit identity has enormous appeal if they only understood it.

You’ll see a focus in the emerging strategic plan on creating roadmaps. We already do so much to embody Jesuit mission – how do we wrap it up in a clear package that will attract students and retain them?

But again, it can’t just be about marketing. We also need to deliver on our promises.

The easiest way to put the question is this -- Whether you have kids yourself or can borrow some imaginary children for a moment, would you send your child to Fordham?  How would you feel about trusting them to us?

A show of hands, how many of you in the room have already sent your children here? Our secret shoppers. You have witnessed through their eyes the glory of this place, but also the missed opportunities, the gaps through which some get lost, the inconsistency of what we provide.

We know from our retention rate that we have work to do. We know we have gaps in the success of those with money, and those without it.  

We know that our best teaching does not always happen in the crucial first year and too much of it comes from part-time adjuncts struggling to be fully part of our community.

Our retention rate is strong, but not strong enough, and that hurts us in multiple ways.  In mission –  because we have failed to create equal opportunity.  In tuition revenue that walks away with the students who transfer.

And it kills us in the rankings. U.S. News, which we love to hate, now focuses intensely on a four-year rolling average of six-year graduation rates. It will take us years to turn this around, but all the more reason to start now. Because this at least, compared to much of the corruption of rankings, is something we agree is important.

I heard from many of you a yearning to do more to level the playing field for students, from financial aid at the front door to our wrap-around services. How do we ensure that access to high-impact practices (like research or study abroad) does not depend on how much money your family earns? How do we integrate commuter students more fully into our community? And create a culture of belonging for all? 

We need to reimagine the first-year undergraduate experience. (Because that is the moment when students are most vulnerable and the quickest to leave us.) We also need to map out the entire undergrad experience, maximize and equalize access to the high-impact practices that we know work. Our graduate and professional students are older and less vulnerable, but they too need us to keep upping our game.

University

Second – we should keep our promise as the Jesuit University of New York.  Which requires being fully a university – with breadth and reach – balancing teaching and world-class research.

At Fordham, we recruit brilliant faculty, many of them drawn here by New York. We have remarkable academic strengths, especially in the humanities and social sciences. And amazing reach in the professions – law, business, education, counseling, and social work.

The work of our faculty attracts an unusual level of grant funding despite the fact that we focus on fields that are not the focus of funding. These last few years, we have invested more in research support and seed money, and you have proved why that matters. Research grants are up 22% this year – congratulations and thank you. 

We proudly hold onto what is essential about a Jesuit education. (A big thank you to the faculty who have engaged in the intensive project of renewing our curriculum-- we can’t wait for the results.) Our core teaches the fundamental skills necessary for every type of career, and more broadly –  for a life of purpose and meaning.

While we hold onto fundamentals, we also pivot to the future, because our students deserve that. They will inherit an economy about to be profoundly disrupted by AI. They need our fundamentals more than ever, but they also need us to anticipate the workforce of the future. To prepare them for an unimaginable pace of change. 

This is the work the faculty does every day in each of our schools, with varying degrees of urgency. How do we adjust our curriculum?

Academic Affairs has made this work a little easier, with data and analysis, so we do not have to guess at job market trends, student interest, and the competitive marketplace. We do more to support new programs with marketing and admissions help.  

We also know that we have a big gap to fill.  For decades – really a century – Fordham has underinvested in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math.) When we give admissions tours, prospective students start to realize that some of lab classrooms have been untouched for a century. We have far fewer STEM majors and graduate programs available than our peers and not enough faculty to meet even the current demand.

And it hurts us – all of us – enormously.  47% of college-bound students want to major in STEM. Fordham loses many of those applicants when they sniff out our weakness. We can tell because only 25% of our applicant pool wants to major in STEM. And our yield of those students is terrible – only 6% of accepted students interested in STEM choose Fordham.

Let me be clear.  It is not that STEM is more important than our existing strengths. We are not trying to pivot and become MIT – we could not. But this is not a good moment in the history of higher ed to shrink and become a liberal arts college instead of a university. Liberal arts colleges are struggling.

We need to lean into being fully a university, one that glories in balance, in the conversations among disciplines. We need to offer students a full array of the subjects they care about. We need to prepare them for a world that no longer makes science and technology optional, no matter what career you choose.

That is even more true of our research, because the world needs Fordham to pay more attention to STEM. More and more of you are focusing on these questions because you feel that urgency. This is a moment when science desperately requires the voice of ethics. A moment when technology threatens the boundaries of humanity.  Economic forces and legal regulation might just determine the future of the human race. It would help to have more colleagues in STEM with whom you can partner.

We can become cutting-edge when we link STEM to our existing strengths. We can leap ahead of where we have fallen behind. Many of you have already started – launching academic programs like our new Master in Data Science and Quantitative Economics, with many more in the pipeline already. Many of you are turning your fields towards the subjects that roil us.

Science is just as core to Jesuit education as philosophy. There are, after all, 35 craters on the moon named after Jesuit astronomers. But we at our most Jesuit when we connect science to philosophy.

I have heard some angst from a few of you about this, so let me be very explicit. We are not going to take resources from other academic subjects to fund STEM. For any of you determined to sink the whole ship before allowing us to invest in science, remember that you’re just shooting holes in the bottom of the boat for no reason. Demanding that we prove our respect for your area by never giving STEM its turn is neither logical nor fair.

A rising tide lifts all boats.  Becoming broader and more relevant, attracting more students and attention, helps us all.   And we cannot become a more serious research institution without greater access to the grant funding that focuses on STEM.

Research matters. As the faculty said loudly and clearly during this process, we need to invest in that research. We must do this to take our place as a prestigious university, to gain attention and status for the brilliance of our faculty, to be able to recruit more of them, and to enhance the quality of our teaching.

We have been furiously raising money for research, with endowed chairs and in clever ways like the EPA grant. But we do not yet have the ability to make big investments from the operating budget – for example, to hire dramatically more faculty in order to lower teaching loads, or move even more of our teaching to adjuncts. (I’ll have a town hall in a few weeks to go over the budget and finances in detail, and answer all your questions.)

But there are other things you reminded us we can do right away. We can convene faculty, fund conferences, and seed ideas. (This year you proved how well that worked.) We can make the whole bigger than the sum of the parts by becoming interdisciplinary, breaking down silos, and coming together across fields. And when we can reach out to partner with the wealth of opportunity in New York, we up our game.

Last year I proposed the idea of research centers or “academies” that would collect our strengths around issues with the biggest impact on the world. Faculty came up with a better idea – a transdisciplinary research incubator that will be evergreen, focusing us on particular areas, yes, but without creating bureaucracies that are hard to sunset. It will remain nimble, changing with the interests of our faculty, changing with the demands of the world. Seeding the best ideas.

We are asking the University Research Council to design this incubator for us, giving them best practice models so they don’t have to start from scratch. They will also identify the obstacles to interdisciplinarity, from formal rules to culture change, that the rest of us can fix.

When we polled research faculty, you agreed on three areas where we can stand out – climate change, AI, and democracy, and you added a fourth area of focus – migration.  204 faculty indicated an academic focus on one of those four areas. We’ve already gathered a group of you focused on AI from a delightful variety of angles. With the EPA grant funding, we can seed our collective interdisciplinary research in climate change. And we will keep going with the rest.

Finally, we are the only Jesuit University in the capital of the world, New York.

The epicenter of the global economy, of much of art and culture, American media, the United Nations. Our students flock here because of New York and tell us in those surveys that they learn as much from the city as they do from us.

We have an enormous alumni network here, a majority of our 200,000 living alums live in the metro area. They are determined to hire our graduates because they believe in them.

We already do a remarkable job of connecting students to opportunity.  In the graduate schools, we provide amazing clinical placements of social workers and counselors. We proudly train teachers, from K-12 to our theology PhD students, some of whom go out to run Catholic universities around the world. Our law school sits at the center of the global legal marketplace and our business school is a few miles from Wall Street.

We launch students into meaningful careers. Almost 90% of our undergrads have jobs within six months or have gone on to graduate studies. Our placement rates in the professional schools are stunning. 

We maximize that impact through experiential learning. Thousands of our undergraduates take community engaged-learning courses, not just volunteering, but processing what they learn in the classroom. Most of all, we do those all-important internships really well, taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunities of New York.

Do you know what percentage of Northeastern students (a school that has become famous for this) engage with internships? 92%. What percentage of Fordham students? 90%.

I went on the best fieldtrip ever last year, when the Papal Nuncio to the UN gave me a tour of the General Assembly last year. He showed me the chair where he sits representing the Vatican, “unless I’m busy,” he said with his Italian accent, “and then my Fordham intern sits in this chair.”

Fordham helps students connect their passion with pragmatism. We train you for the workplace of the future. We give you unprecedented ability to matter to the world, to function on a global stage.

Let’s brag about this better, make it more central to our identity. Why wouldn’t we?

There is a temptation in higher ed to link academic status with not caring about the usefulness of what we teach. The life of the mind, unsullied by pragmatic concerns. But that’s a really dumb temptation, for two reasons.

First, what we teach, especially in the core curriculum IS useful –  we teach critical thinking, communication, emotional intelligence, integrity. These will be the driving forces behind our students’ careers and success in life.  (And, by the way, with their sense of purpose, life-long curiosity, skills of citizenship, and general happiness. But we can argue both!)

Since when do we cede the ground of the usefulness of our teaching?

But the second point is just as important. Fordham is expensive, one of the biggest financial investments our students will make in their entire lives. A quarter of our undergrads are the first in their family to go to college, as are many of our graduate students. This is their great chance in life, OR, if not careful, their debt-laden downfall. For us to signal that we don’t care about the return on that investment because it is beneath us would be the height of entitlement.

Here, especially, we really can just brag more loudly about what we already achieve. But we could also do better. We heard loud and clear from Arts and Science students that they wish they had the kind of career resources, mentoring, and counseling that Gabelli students get with their more focused job interests.

We can lean into New York even more.  Building partnerships is such grassroots work, thousands of relationships developed by many of you over decades.  We have hired someone to help us coordinate partnerships across schools – so we’ll all know who we’re collectively talking to – and we can dream bigger.

One last thing – a quick, if not easy, way for students to double their access to New York.  How can we encourage students to embrace both campuses, really feel like the whole university is theirs, not just half? They take their cues from us, so I’ll need your help in that work.

This – all of this – could be the direction we choose to head as a university -- keeping our promises, executing better, living up to our possibility.

But how do we get there?

For one thing, we raise money, especially for the most ambitious goals like long-overdue STEM facilities and more engaged academic spaces at Lincoln Center. Scholarships and endowed faculty positions across schools.

Thanks to DAUR, our world-class development and alumni relations staff, I’m happy to tell you that we completed our $350 million campaign this summer. Congratulations to them. [Much of that money goes into the endowment to help with financial aid and support our faculty and their research. It built the student center that is now the prime stop on the admissions tour.]

DAUR got the whole weekend off before beginning the silent phase of the next campaign, when we get to dream together in ambitious and innovative ways that inspire donors.

In the meantime, our strategic planning focuses on what WE can do NOW. Even without much seed money, there are problems within our power to fix, creative ideas that will up our game.

I hope you’ll read the framework document and give us your feedback. In surveys for efficiency or listening sessions for community. The document gives more details of process.

Some of you may be listening to this with excitement, eager to take on the creative work of strategy. The tinkerers and dreamers. We need you! Thank you!

For all of us, this will be a call to keep striving. Because phoning it in will never be enough for us. Because being Jesuit doesn’t stand for mediocrity, it stands for excellence.  Because we are ambitious – within our careers and our fields – and we are ambitious for Fordham. Because we love our students and want to do more for them. Because this is who we are.

Conclusion

I’ll end, thank goodness, with the last part of the emerging plan – creating community here at Fordham. It is the subject you spoke about the most.

We model the warmth of our community for students, but we also know our connections have frayed. We – all of you -- are so eager to build them back.

You asked, over and over again, how can we come together again? How do we break down our fierce silos? Create real belonging for all of us? Bring back the joy?

Some of this can come from me. To build trust through transparency. To harness the power of shared governance. To listen intently, and fix what is broken. I hope you’ve seen how hard I’m trying to do all of that.

But much of the work of building community has to be about all of us.

We should use our secret weapon and lean into Jesuit mission. Not just by reciting “Jesuit mission” as a mantra, but really learning what it means, teaching it to each other, and reveling in its power. In a fit of good timing, we have the Mission Priority Examen – the Jesuit reaccreditation of sorts – that will help us think deeply about how to hold onto who we are.

We tell our students every day that we want them to have lives of meaning and purpose. At our best, we model for them what it means to have lives of meaning and purpose. To show them that we have chosen work that matters to the world.

As much as we all want Fordham to flourish and succeed, to be secure in our beautiful community here, as much as we envy the resources of wealthier institutions in their ease and compensation levels -- when it comes down to actually enduring change and disruption – we hold back.

For those of you who ask whether I can guarantee the status quo, but with more resources – I wish I could, but I cannot. To do nothing guarantees decline.

And remember -- we don’t look back at Fordham’s 183 years and wish that the university had never changed. We don’t look back at courageous and controversial decisions made in years past – to buy Lincoln Center for example. To admit women. We don’t wish those decisions had been delayed until total consensus had been reached.

We think about those paths not taken years ago by people just like us, because of hesitation and resistance, paths that might have launched Fordham on a very different trajectory.

And we realize, this is our moment.

Fordham, this is our moment.

Thank you.