in a recent interview with the Jesuit Conference, President Tetlow discussed the joys and challenges of her role, what makes Fordham unique within the competitive marketplace of higher education, the chaotic state of college athletics today, and more.
The happy surprise is that the incredible student warmth that I had at Loyola is also here at Fordham. I didn’t know if the bigger institution in blunt, aggressive New York would be different, but it’s not. These students are amazing and so kind to each other. And the challenges are the challenges of higher ed. We are navigating an increasingly hostile world where higher ed is a political football. And the growing affordability crisis is something we have to deal with, too.
One thing that Jesuit schools collectively have been doing and thinking about is, how do we better remind people what Jesuit education is? There’s a very important part of Jesuit tradition: When you go into a foreign land, you don’t just shout at people in Latin. And I think when we talk to Gen Z, it’s not enough to talk to them about cura personalis and magis, right? We have to translate into their language, so we’ve really been working hard to do that.
We have to make it clear that this is not a place of intolerance, that to be a Catholic institution does not mean we don’t want people of other faiths or people who are not of faith. And if you are a person of faith, no one is going to make you feel stupid or anti-intellectual or presume your politics. You get to be your full self here in ways that aren’t always true in an increasingly hostile secular world that is disrespectful of all religions too often.
In response to a question about the importance of athletics in higher ed and the changes with the transfer portal and NIL:
I think that in important efforts to regulate those handful of schools that make lots of money on athletics, the risk is that they kind of ruin it everywhere else. Schools like ours and most in this country spend money on athletics — we don’t profit off of them at all, not even close.
And we do it because we’re trying to enrich the lives of students. We look at our outcomes for student athletes. They graduate at higher levels, and they have incredible career outcomes. Employers love them because they’re the kind of kid who got up at six in the morning to go out in the cold and practice and learn teamwork and discipline. So we don’t want to lose that in the context of regulating Power Five football.
