NY Times on Famous Fordham Dorm Rooms

The New York Times City Room blog has an interesting article on "Dorm Rooms With Bragging Rights," and Fordham has some:

Fordham University in the Bronx can also hold its own. The eight students who ended up with E6 of Martyrs’ Court in 1983 learned that they had inherited the third-floor suite once occupied by Alphonso Joseph D’Abruzzo, later known as Alan Alda. As big fans of his hit television show “M.A.S.H.,” they thought it only fitting to hold a party the night of the final episode with makeshift tenting and drinks poured from an improvised still. Everyone from the BBC to The New York Post was there to chronicle it.

“I went once to the University of Virginia and they had Edgar Allan Poe’s old dorm room blocked off with glass, so you could see it but not use it anymore,’’ said Joe Trentacosta, a host of the farewell party. Being able to live in the famous room, he said, “makes you feel more connected to the school.”

Anyone wanting to live in Mr. Alda’s room now would need an engineer’s help to find it. Seven double rooms numbered L200 to L206 have displaced the eight-man suite on the floor plan. But the shared bathroom — L207 on the map (pdf) — and old plumbing are intact.

(There is no point even looking for traces of the heartthrob from Fordham’s class of 1977, Denzel Washington. University officials confirm that he commuted.)

The article by Alison Leigh Cowan and David Walter will likely appear in tomorrow's (Friday, May 28) print edition, as well.

Alan Alda Searches for the Human Spark

Few people are as passionate about science education as Alan Alda, FCRH ’56. This month, the Emmy Award-winning actor, writer and director returns to PBS to host a three-part documentary called The Human Spark.

The project grew out of Alda’s longtime involvement with the PBS series Scientific American Frontiers, which he hosted with ample curiosity, wit and good humor from 1993 until the show was canceled—much to the disappointment of its loyal viewers—in 2005.

In the new documentary, Alda travels to three continents to interview leading archeologists, primatologists and neuroscientists in an attempt to discover what makes humans unique among species, how a tiny difference in our genes, for example, makes a huge difference in who we are and what we can do.

“I don’t try to explain their work to anyone,” Alda recently told The New York Times, “I just try to understand it.”

He also participates in the research; in one episode, for example, he submits to a highly detailed scan of his brain, which, we’re pleased to know, “is in remarkably good shape for a man in his early 70s.”

The series airs at 8 p.m. on three consecutive Wednesdays: Jan. 6, 13 and 20.

“We can’t promise we’ll find the human spark,” Alda says in a video introduction posted on the project’s website. “But we can promise that looking for it will be fascinating. And it may change the way you think about who you are.”

—Ryan Stellabotte, Editor
FORDHAM Magazine