Tania Tetlow is the first woman and lay president of Fordham University. She will be honored with the Commonweal Centennial Award at the Commonweal Centennial Benefit Dinner on October 28, 2024, in New York. President Tetlow spoke with editor Dominic Preziosi for the Commonweal Podcast; this is a condensed version of their conversation.
Dominic Preziosi: Access to a college education is more and more of an issue in terms of how we think about universities. There’s the issue of cost, of course, but also of extending opportunity to students who may have been traditionally underrepresented. How do you see Fordham addressing this issue? Especially given its history of educating first-generation college students and students from the neighboring community, does a Catholic or Jesuit school like Fordham have a special responsibility here?
Tania Tetlow: We do. It’s a fundamental part of our mission, and particularly of American Catholic higher education. Places like Fordham were created for those first-generation immigrant students, the Irish Catholics, the Italians, and now Latinos and so many others. We’re very proud to still be 20 percent first-generation students, to be racially diverse, and to have students from every corner of this country and the world. In that work, it’s about being as affordable as possible and creating the kind of academic excellence our students deserve, but at a price they can afford. Bridging that gap gets harder and harder, but it is core to what we do.
And it’s not the end of the fairy tale to get into college. We also have to level the playing field when students are with us, to do everything we can to make students understand how we have chosen them to be here, that they are part of our community—that we need them, they need us, and that we create a family together.
DP: Since you came to Fordham you’ve maintained a visible presence in New York City. You show up in local news, and there are clips of you appearing at service events and public performances. Of course, famously, you sang the national anthem at a Yankees game. And you’ve spoken to students as well about the need to engage with the Bronx community around Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. What is the importance and value of that, and how does it fit into how you see the role of the university in general?
TT: Fordham has been an anchor institution of New York, and particularly the Bronx, for 183 years, so our fates are intertwined. It has always been a fundamental part of the tradition of those who ran this university to be citizens of the city and, specifically, of the Bronx community. We have two very different campuses at Fordham; one is in Manhattan in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country, and the other is in the Bronx alongside some of the poorest. That dichotomy is very real for us. We know that we have to do everything to reach out to our community, to engage with local schools. We bring students onto our campus and make sure we have a constant parade of kids from the neighborhood who may not imagine themselves on our campus, even though it’s so close to where they grow up, making sure they know that we want them to be with us. We’re a global school with geographic diversity, but about seven percent of our students are from the Bronx.
Our connections with community groups are longstanding. Something we’re doing right now is taking a building we’ve owned for a while, which is just sitting there empty on Fordham Road, and making it a community center where we put together all the work that Fordham is doing—from legal clinics to community outreach to service-learning to our foundry, which helps incubate small-business ideas and innovation. We’re also able to house some local nonprofits, and to give them vibrant working and office space.
DP: What does it mean to be a Catholic university? Are Catholic universities, in your assessment, doing too little to maintain or advertise their Catholic identity? Some point to decreasing enrollments and questions about identity to say that there is a “crisis in Catholic higher education.” What’s your view?
TT: We are really in mission territory with the work we do; we’re not running a parish of people who’ve chosen to be with us. Increasingly, our students are not just from a variety of different faiths, but from no faith at all, having grown up with no religious education or background whatsoever. We may get accused of diluting our identity because we’re somehow embarrassed by it. But the reality is, we try to be invitational. We’re trying very hard to persuade people who don’t know anything about who we are, or what “Catholic” stands for, of our values, our identity, and of having respect for religion. We can really own the fact that we stand for inclusion and tolerance. And we’ve always been a place where you can be religious in an increasingly secular world that’s too often hostile to religion, and not be embarrassed about that.
Lots of people from other faiths are drawn to us because of that fact, but we also reach out to those who come to their values from different angles. And when we do that invitational work, we know we’re on the right track, because that’s exactly how the Gospel describes how Jesus behaved. He didn’t come in and yell at people about bylaws and rules; he didn’t make them feel shame. He welcomed them and tried to make them feel the love of God.
I will say, higher education has become excruciatingly difficult in this country economically. We’re privileged enough to not be as constrained and squeezed as a lot of our sister institutions are, but there are four thousand colleges and universities in this country. The population of eighteen-year-olds and the percentage of Americans going to college are both declining. Many of those incredibly feisty Catholic institutions that have been a profound part of educational opportunity and mission in this country are struggling. They face very painful financial choices every day. I think the way to stand out in this crowded marketplace is not by being bland and like everybody else. It’s by having an identity. When I talk to my peers, we all know how profoundly it matters to our survival that we double down on mission and who we are. But those choices just get harder and harder for the vast majority of schools.
DP: Earlier this year, you wrote in the Hill about the effects of the pandemic on the educational achievements of young people: “In higher education, we already see the results on high school students, but we fret even more about the impact on little kids, the disruption of that all-important early childhood education. It is a ticking time bomb that cannot wait to be addressed until students come to our campuses, or worse, fail to come to college at all.” You go on to propose what you call a national tutoring corps. How would such an initiative address the crisis you see coming?
TT: Repairing the damage from the gaps students experienced during the pandemic needs to happen now, while students are still young. Research on how to catch students up shows the very unsurprising conclusion that what works best is high-dose tutoring, teaching students individually at exactly their pace with exactly what they need. For those kids who didn’t have an iPad at home, whose parents had to work and couldn’t individually teach them during the lockdown, those gaps are huge. And the delay in reading and basic math skills isn’t solved on its own magically, and it’s not solved with teachers who have thirty kids in a classroom trying to catch them up. The hope is that if we really focus on this as a national crisis, we could incentivize young people to participate in a national tutoring corps, maybe through loan forgiveness, for example. And this service might also help bond young people to each other in the way that military service does, and so it could solve a lot of problems at once. But we really need to treat it as a priority, because—to put it in the language of self-interest—we are going to lose global economic competitiveness quickly. Countries we compete with are not backing down on how much they invest in education. But we, in various ways, really have.
DP: I’ve had discussions with other leaders in higher education these past several months. A topic that comes up a lot is the role of the university and how it’s supposed to be a place for the free exchange of ideas. But the meaning of “free exchange” has become contested and controversial in recent years. What do you think universities should do to ensure the continuance of free exchange but also civility in classrooms and on campus?
TT: I’ll put my law-professor hat on for a moment. The idea of free speech is really about public spaces where we all get to yell at each other to our heart’s content and say almost anything. What happens at universities is different in that we have places where we allow free-speech zones. But what we also have is academic freedom, which is about the freedom of speech, expression, and thought necessary for learning to happen.
What we have to work hard at, as teachers and as administrators, is creating the kind of freedom where we model for students that they can disagree with us, but that there are facts that we’re not going to argue about. When it comes to the world of opinion, judgment, and humility, of being open, curious, and willing to be wrong—that is what we’re supposed to do as a university. And a profound part of the Catholic intellectual tradition is to posit ideas and then be willing to be proved wrong. I think we do that in higher ed really well the vast majority of the time.
But the work of navigating classroom discussions is not easy. We’re in a fraught moment where we have a perfect storm of painful issues hitting each other, of vulnerable people at odds with each other. Right now, I’m turning my attention to this fall and working hard with our community not just on freedom of expression but also civility. The freedom to yell at each other is not enough. We really have to learn and teach students how they can persuade each other, how they can be open and humble, and how to incorporate all the things that Ignatius taught us about the work of discernment. That identity of humility, curiosity, and openness, of assuming good intentions—it’s not exactly how the world works right now. We’re trying to model the opposite of what students have grown up with in the world of social media and in our political environment.
I’ve got to tell you, being scolded by Congress about civility on our campuses is a little hard to take, you know? What would really help us is if they could model a different way for our students. But we’ve got a lot of work to do.
DP: Can you speak about the issue of civility more broadly, especially as we approach a national election? Are you hopeful about initiatives like the Dignity Index—which was developed by Timothy Shriver’s nonprofit UNITE? [The Dignity Index, according to its website, “is an eight-point scale that scores speech along a continuum from contempt to dignity in as unbiased a manner as possible. By focusing on the sound bites, not the people behind them, the Index attempts to stay true to its own animating spirit: that everyone deserves dignity.”] Can something like this cut through the cynicism that seems to be characterizing our discourse?
TT: What I love about the Dignity Index is that it’s not just pontificating about the fact that it’s rude and obnoxious and ineffective to insult people when you’re trying to persuade them. It’s that it creates a scoring system. It doesn’t measure truthfulness or persuasiveness, it’s not about whether your argument is right; it’s whether you argue in a way that is dignified—or whether you simply try to tear down your opponent. When I talked to Timothy Shriver, he said that students who were helping score political speeches for him started using it for themselves, and monitoring themselves according to the scoring system. There’s something clever about the fact that it was concrete in that way, and that they were very quickly aspiring to do better themselves.
We are going to work with student leadership and groups in the fall to see if we can introduce this. Especially if it comes from them, if they have the collective power to determine what kind of community they can create, then I think it would have enormous power.
DP: Another concern for higher education is the rapid evolution of technology, and especially artificial intelligence. This has brought some benefits to higher education, of course, but there are also major implications, especially with AI, as the Chronicle of Higher Education put it earlier this summer: “For all the potential benefits, higher education and AI are fundamentally mismatched in a number of ways.” What’s your take on the impact of artificial intelligence, especially in terms of what we understand to be the university’s role in teaching critical thinking?
TT: The pedagogical questions are really profound. Our faculty here are wonderfully obsessed with what to do. We’re giving them a lot of autonomy about how best to handle it and to navigate this experiment so we can figure it out.
But the other thing we face is that this is going to disrupt the economy more quickly and more profoundly than the internet in a major way. So, we have to think about pivoting to the kinds of skills our students will need in a world where, you know, ideally, a lot of the scut work of life gets done by AI, while people are freed up to do all sorts of magical, wonderful, humanistic things. I’m not sure it will pan out that way, but we have to figure it out quickly.
I’ll give you a concrete example. The work of lawyers will be very different very soon. I became a lawyer in a time when I looked in physical books to find citations, and I spent hours doing things that within my young adulthood became computerized. All of that’s about to go up by a factor of ten. And so it is our obligation to prepare students for this changing world—to predict where the jobs of the future are. Because jobs, particularly the jobs young people do, may be eliminated by technology, while those kinds of superior skills of emotional intelligence, of diplomacy, of creativity can’t be replaced by technology. So we’re trying to think as an institution about what we owe our students, because we in higher ed are not nimble. We have for a thousand years protected ourselves against the forces of change. This is a moment where we’re going to have to be more nimble, to be a step ahead, not one hundred years behind. It’s a daunting time for all sorts of people—but particularly those in education.
