Beinecke Scholarship Winner Honored

Thomas Parkinson and Nikolas Oktaba exchange greetings
at the Lincoln Center campus.
Photo by Jill LeVine

Last spring Nikolas Oktaba, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center, (FCLC) junior majoring in classical civilizations and classical languages, learned that he’d won one of 20 prestigious Beinecke Scholarships, which would allow him to continue his studies in graduate school.

On Oct. 24, it was made official, as Thomas Parkinson, Ph.D., program director for the Sperry Fund, which administers the scholarship, formally made the announcement in the office of FCLC Dean Robert Grimes, S.J.

The scholarship includes $30,000 for studies at a yet-to-be-determined graduate school and another $4,000 to cover the cost of applications.

Also on hand for the event were Fordham faculty members Andrew Clark, Ph.D., associate professor of French and comparative literature, Anne Golumb Hoffman Ph.D., professor of English, and Mary Shelley, assistant director of prestigious fellowships at Lincoln Center.

The awards were established in 1971 by the Board of Directors of the Sperry & Hutchinson Company in honor of Edwin, Frederick, and Walter Beinecke. Parkinson said that he makes a point to present the scholarships in person. 

“It gives me a chance to get out and meet all these wonderful and talented people,” said Parkinson. “The family believes that rather than just give the students the money and say good luck, they really want a more involved relationship.

“One of the nice things about doing this is you work with really quality people. I’m sure that wherever Nicholas is accepted, he will find that he’ll do well,” he said.

Oktaba said the scholarship commitment was of “existential importance” to the liberal arts. He thanked Parkinson for supporting his plan to study how ancient people’s social construction of painful questions of identity had an impact on life in late antiquity. 

“I would like to show people that the classics are more than lifeless ruins and broken statuary,” he said. “I would like to give students the ability to engage with these sometimes painful questions of gender, sexuality, and identity as a whole, in a deeper, more meaningful manner.”

Andrew Clark, Anne Hoffman, Thomas Parkinson, Nikolas Oktaba, Mary Shelley, and Robert Grimes, S.J.
Photo by Jill LeVine

—Patrick Verel

Lincoln Center Opening Day: Students Break in New Residence Hall

Opening Day at the Lincoln Center campus was at times lightning fast, as when student workers descended upon cars parked at the curb on West 62nd Street, and at times less fast, as when incoming students waited for one of the four elevators to whisk them to their rooms as high as 22 stories up. But by days end, nearly 300 students successfully found their ways to what they'll be calling home for the next year.

—Photos by Chris Taggart

Ailey/Fordham Concert to Benefit Dancers

Playful Vibes. Rushing into the Dream of the Night. Pulse Suspended. 

These are just a few of the pieces that will bring exquisite, exhilarating movement of bodies to Fordham’s Pope Auditorium next week, as the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater/Fordham University BFA program stages its annual benefit performance.

Thursday, March 6

7 p.m.

Pope Auditorium, Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center Building 

The benefit, which has been a tradition at the Lincoln Center campus since 2001, features performances from each class of Fordham/Ailey students. The dance performances are followed by a reception where dancers meet members of the Fordham community, including many of the benefactors who helped fund the scholarships that enable them to attend.

The BFA degree, a unique partnership between the world renowned Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s Ailey School, and Fordham, combines the finest in dance and liberal arts education in a four-year program. Students complete a diverse curriculum while attending both institutions full time.

For more information, contact Rodger Van Allen at (212) 636-6562 or visit the alumni website.

—Patrick Verel

Simulation Showcases New Technique for Cyberwars

Cyber warfare is in many ways similar to traditional warfare in that there are techniques one can practice in “war games” to gauge whether you are prepared against your enemies.

At a breakout session on day two of ICCS2013 Kristin E. Heckman, D.Sc., lead scientist at MaClean, Va.-based MITRE Corporation, and Frank J. Stech, Ph.D., principal investigator for MITRE, described a simulation they conducted in January 2012 that tested a new technique for defense: Denial and Deception.

The concept behind “St. Louis Experiment II,” was to utilize a new program dubbed Blackjack to detect when a team of hackers infiltrated the target, (C2 Mission System). Instead of kicking them out, it redirected the hackers to another server and rewrote, in real time, the content they were seeing—mimicking the Trojan Horse concept where hackers think they are getting something they aren’t

“This is an enormous task, dynamically rewriting the content based on policy, and doing it in real time, and trying to ensure there are no time delays or any other issues with delivery,” Heckman said.

The test pitted teams from a fictional Republic of New England against the Republic of Virginia, with Washington D.C. stuck in the middle of what was dubbed the “Borderlands.” 

The results, which the team published as “Active Cyber Network Defense with Denial and Deception,” in the journal Computers & Security, where mixed. 

Even though Blackjack was unsuccessful because hackers were able to infiltrate the target undetected and therefore saw content being altered, Heckman said the Denial and Deception concept is still very promising. 

And, the other side, said Heckmann, believed they had a “double agent”, which was not true and which “we could have used to our benefit.”

—Patrick Verel

Internet Content Delivery Exec Details Security Techniques for Web

When you visit your local bank’s website, the chances are very good that what you are seeing is not hosted on the bank’s computer servers. 

Rather, what you’re seeing is most likely stored on one of a thousand different servers around the world that are maintained by Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies.

Only when you try to say, transfer funds from one account to another, will you be directed to the banks’ server. But even then, you are only interacting with it via a proxy server that is also maintained by Akamai, which maintains 127,000 servers in 81 countries around the world. 

That, said Bruce Maggs, Ph.D., is an example of how the company’s perimeter cloud computing design helps ward off distributed denial of service (D.D.O.S.) attacks. 

Maggs, the Pelham Wilder Professor of Computer Science at Duke University and Vice President of Research at Akamai Technologies, described Akamai’s role in protecting computer systems at the 2013 International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS), hosted by Fordham and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

He used his talk on Tuesday, "The Big Target: Content Delivery networks Under Cyber Attack," to walk through case studies of four phases of “Operation Ababil,” a series of cyber attacks against American financial institutions that started in September 2012. 

The goal of having such a decentralized design is to make it harder for D.D.O.S. attacks, which subject target servers to a torrent of data requests, to take down the entire system, while legitimate queries are redirected to unaffected servers. Maggs noted that for this reason, Akamai is entrusted to host the websites for the FBI and the White House.

It’s important to have systems such as these in place, because he pointed out that the number of major D.D.O.S. attacks, (those over 100 gigabits) is rising, with a record 768 incidents last year. 

“You can cause multi server disruptions for a small number of users, but you would really need a tremendous number of attackers to take out a fraction of our servers at once,” he noted. 

“In fact, it’s our belief that if anyone had enough fire power to bring a large number of servers down through denial of service attacks, at that point, they would have melted down the whole internet anyway, and there would be bigger problems than breaking down Akamai.”

—Patrick Verel

Fordham College at Lincoln Center Students Show Off Research

Photos by Patrick Verel

The plaza and street level of Lowenstein Center were abuzz on April 11 as 42 juniors and seniors from Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) shared their research with the Fordham community.

The research fair, which was followed by an awards ceremony, featured topics in humanities, sciences. and visual and performing arts.

Molly Clemens, a junior from Rochester majoring in environmental science, was stationed on the plaza to discuss “Drought Creates Stress Memory for European Beech Trees,” which she worked on at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. 

A DAAD Rise scholarship enabled her to travel to Germany last summer, where Laura Nagy, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Bayreuth, served as her mentor.

Clemens' research concerned whether or not European Beech trees have the ability to adapt to a drought and survive a second drought better.

Molly Clemens chats with a research fair attendee.

“We set up four different control groups using 60 beech trees, and we subjected them to four different regiments of water-we had a control drought, a control for the control, and then the double drought,” she said.

“What we were able to see is that the double drought plants were able to recover better and survived better than the control drought plants did that did not undergo the first draught.”

Clemens hopes to build on this research with a Fulbright scholarship that she is applying for in Australia. She also worked on two other projects in Germany, where she was given a lot of leeway to choose how to approach research.

“The other project was a biodiversity project assessing the biodiversity of grasses, so we would spend long hours smelling grasses and biting them and feeling them, because it's actually very hard to distinguish between them if you just have a pile of grass,” she said. 

“It was very hands-on science.”

Lauren Vogelstein observes Ailey/Fordham BFA students
performing her dance "I think I heard you say that once."

Down on the street level, Lauren Vogelstein was showing off an independent study in choreography. Vogelstein, a senior Ailey/Fordham BFA student from Chicago, presented a demonstration of the dance “I Think I Heard You Say That Once,” which she described as the culmination of four years of trying and failing to create something she was truly happy with.

“I’ve learned what my teachers have been telling me all along, which is that you have to let go of the preciousness of your work in order to create something you really love,” she said. 

Vogelstein is also earning a bachelor's of science in mathematics and will be working at the Museum of Mathematics after graduation. Although she has done formal mathematical research with one of her professors, she chose to present dance at the fair. 

“I thought it was important to show art in a context as research, because I don’t think a lot of people think you can do research in the arts, so I wanted to bring that to the fair today,” she said. 

Cody Brown and Nick Espinoza show off their UAV, which
is capable of analyzing wireless networks from the air.

On the ground floor by the Center Gallery, were Cody Brown and Nick Espinoza, seniors majoring in computer science and political science and information science, respectively. 

“Bridging and Observing Wireless Services for Electronic Reconnaissance,” or BOWSER, involved the construction of a rotor-driven unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) capable of wireless access reconnaissance barnstorming and penetration testing.

“We picked a drone to utilize the city’s uniquely vertical environment to go up and down apartment buildings, where you’ll find a lot more wireless networks than you would in a flat area,” said Brown.

“Let’s say you’re a contractor. You can test for security flaws in company enterprise networks, or just have fun and map out networks around you.”

Espinoza, who hopes to work in cyber security upon graduation, touted their UAV as a unique solution to a very real problem with penetration testing. 

“You can’t exactly see these wireless networks. You might have to go into the building and access the floor," he said. "Why would you take the elevator, and talk your way past security, when you can fly your way right up next to it?”

Jamie Juchniewicz illustrated how words affected the
attitudes of 18th-century American colonists.

Jamie Juchniewicz, a junior anthropology major, addressed the past for her project “Revolution: The Vocabulary of the American Revolution.” What topics, she wondered, would have trended the highest  if Twitter had existed in the American colonies between 1763 and 1776? 

For her project, which she hopes will help her continue onto graduate school, she took five of the most popular American pamphlets from each of the years, from 1763 to 1776, and ran them through Voyant, a processing software that calculates the most used words.

“When we start out in 1765, we’re only seeing the word “American” two times, and when we end in 1776, we see the word “American” 12 times. The colonials are seeing themselves transforming from, 'I’m a member of this colony,' 'I’m a member of the Maryland colony,' 'I’m a Pennsylvanian,' 'I'm a New Yorker,' into seeing themselves as an American, because they’re all sharing the same language,” she said.

Words like "authority" and "fame" highlighted the power of the individual, especially going into the revolution, she said. "So you can identify all the main actors by the words they’re using and the political activities that followed the language.”

—Patrick Verel

Fordham Undergrads Visit Capitol for Government Tour

Fordham Students meet with Treasury Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin

Students from Fordham College at Rose Hill, Fordham College Lincoln Center, and the Gabelli School of Business got to see the nation’s economic levers of power in person during a visit to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, March 27. 

The trip, which was sponsored by the Fordham President's Council member Ed Blount, FCRH '69, brought 25 students to the Treasury Department, the Office of Management and Budget, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve. 

At the Treasury Department, the group met with Deputy Secretary Neal Wolin, who spoke to them about the economic recovery and the ongoing work by the Administration to strengthen economic growth and stability in our financial systems. Wolin also touched on the ongoing debate in Washington on how to reduce our deficits in a balanced way.

Olivia Chopra, FCRH '13, a dual economics and Middle Eastern Studies major, said the trip not only bolstered her passion for public policy but also gave her a sense of where her passion can take her in the future.

“I particularly enjoyed the Q&A session with Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Neal Wolin, who was able to answer our questions regarding international economic issues, including the current financial policy towards Iran,” she said. 

Veronica Daigle, FCRH '93, program examiner for the Office
of  Management  and Budget, chats with students.

“Equally as engaging, the presentation at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) shed light onto the domestic issue of the Federal budgeting process and the current sequester.  I was very impressed by our presenter at the OMB, Fordham alumna Veronica Daigle, whose knowledge of and dedication to her work as a program examiner was inspiring.”

Evangelos Razis, FCLC '13, said the experience was both exciting and humbling.

“We toured the institutions that are fundamental to our nation’s political economy, and it’s quite something to see where those fundamental decisions are being made. It’s too easy think of a government body like 'The Treasury' and the 'SEC' merely in the abstract. In the end, we’re talking about real people, buildings, and things,” he said.

“The people we spoke with were all professionals committed to serving our country. As an aspiring public servant, that shared sense of duty resonated with me.”

—Patrick Verel

Panel: Christians and Other Animals

Christians and Other Animals: Moving the Conversation Forward

Friday, 16 November | 4 to 6 p.m.

12th-floor Lounge | Lowenstein Center

Fordham College at Lincoln Center

Panelists

Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University

David Clough, Professor of Theological Ethics and Department Chair, University of Chester

Eric Meyer, Fordham Doctoral Candidate in Theology

R.R. Reno, Professor of Theological Ethics, Creighton University, editor of First Things

Moderator

Charles Camosy, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Christian Ethics, Fordham University

This panel, conducted with non-specialists in mind, will provoke Christians to think about other animals in new ways. Currently a very hot topic in academic theology and philosophy, concern for non-human animals is gaining traction in the broader culture, and our panel will try to connect academic and popular themes, in language that is accessible to a broad audience.

Peter Singer—in addition to being the most influential philosopher alive today—was the intellectual heft behind the beginning of the animal rights movement in the 1970s. David Clough is one of the leading voices in defense of animals in the contemporary Christian conversation, and Eric Meyer’s research has mined the Christian tradition in ways that turn the current debate about animals on its head. We are also fortunate to have R.R. Reno play the all-important role of ‘sympathetic skeptic’ in our discussion. The conversation will be accessible to non-specialists.

Space is limited. RSVP to christiansandotheranimals@gmail.com. 

Download the flyer as a PDF here.

Co-Sponsors: Department of Theology, Center for Religion and Culture, Office of the Provost, Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Dean of Fordham University Faculty

Fordham Theater Students Tapped as Broadway Show Ambassadors

When members of the Broadway League gathered at the Millennium Broadway Hotel Times Square on Tuesday, May 15 for their annual Spring Road Conference, Fordham junior Ellen Goldberg was there to greet them.

Goldberg, a theater major at Fordham College Lincoln Center specializing in set design, spoke to roughly 100 attendees on a panel about attracting new theatergoers. As part of her appearance, she read excerpts from two blog entries she wrote in late March for Broadwayworld.com. 

The posts detailed what it was like to be one of 15 students who were invited to take a peek backstage for two at the technical rehearsal of the production of Clybourne Park, which is currently playing at the Walter Kerr Theater. She was joined by the play’s producer and director.

“I thought being part of the creative process was fantastic, and Clybourne Park is one of the shows that I do theater because of, and I encourage everyone I see and meet to see it,” she said. 

The production, which Goldberg described as a sort of reverse of A Raisin in the Sun, and tackles sticky issues of reverse racism. The two days she was able to spend at the tech rehearsal altered her perception of the people who work on Broadway, which she called her ultimate goal.

“I thought they’d be more like super heroes, and these crazy insane untouchable people, but they’re just normal people,” she said. 

“It’s very similar to the tech rehearsals we have at Fordham, they just have a bigger budget and they have more people working on it.”

Along with Goldberg, Fordham contributors to the blog included: Anna Abowd, Jake Ahlquist, Zoe Allen, Emilie Amar Zifkin, Emily Auciello, Victoria Bausch, John Bezark, Quinn Coughlin, Jordana De La Cruz, Sarah Ford, Sierra Fox, Dan Geggatt, Megan Lang, Jenni Meador, Nora McNally, Sofia Montgomery, Lindsey Norman, Jacob Sexton, Emily Tabachuk and Andrew Watkin. 

To see their blog posts, visit Broadwayworld.com.

—Patrick Verel

RecycleMania Taps Enthusiasm for the Environment

Six weeks after joining a nation-wide contest to see who can best keep their bottles, cans and cardboard out of landfills, the residents of Queen’s Court, Salice-Conley Hall and McMahon Hall are in the lead for Fordham's biggest recycler.

According to statistics compiled weekly, the Rose Hill campus’ Queen's Court has recycled the most paper and cardboard, at five pounds per person. Nearby Salice-Conley Hall is leading the charge with glass, metal and plastic, at 6.70 pounds per person.

When it comes to keeping trash out of the system though, students at the 10 residence halls in the Bronx have nothing on their Manhattan brethren. Residents of McMahon Hall, which is on the Lincoln Center campus, have generated 9.75 pounds of trash per person.

RecycleMania, an annual contest between colleges around the country to see who can recycle more during an eight-week period, started in 2001 as a competition between Miami University of Ohio and Ohio University, and now features 630 schools.

This is the first year Fordham has participated in the contest, in the informal “Benchmark” division. In both the formal and informal divisions, schools submit weight data for paper, cardboard, cans and bottles, food waste and general trash each week, and are in turn able to see how they measure up against each other.

Since the competition began, a total of 45 tons of material have been collected from Fordham residence halls. The contest runs through April 2, so there is still time left to earn bragging rights as the greenest among them all.

For more information, visit http://www.recyclemania.org/

—Patrick Verel

Voices Up: Songs for James Joyce & Hart Crane

The Voices Up premiere of Songs for Joyce by Samuel Barber and Victoria Bond, and Songs for Crane by Elliott Carter, Lawrence Kramer and Alexander Nohai-Seaman.

Friday, March 11, 2011 | 7:30 p.m.
Lowenstein Center | 12th-Floor Lounge
Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus
Free and Open to the Public

Joyce, Crane, and Fordham University Press
This event is held in collaboration with Fordham's Poet's Out Loud program and will (as all Voices Up events do) feature live readings of the texts set to music. This year's event commemorates the publication, by Fordham University Press, of the first critical edition of Hart Crane's epic of America, The Bridge, edited by Lawrence Kramer, professor of English at Fordham, and the 2011 edition of Joyce Studies Annual, edited by Moshe Gold and Philip Sicker. Books will be available at the concert.

Fordham Students Take Home Design Award

Shane Moan and Andrew Koudlai may call different Fordham campuses home, but when it came to a recent design competition, they won as fellow Rams.

Moan, a sophomore theatre design major at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, and Koudlai, a senior pre-architecture major at Fordham College at Rose Hill, took home honorable mentions on Tuesday, March 2 in “Revealing Shadows,” a contest sponsored by the New York City section of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America.

They were chosen along with four other prize-winners from a field of 135 entries from schools such as Parsons The New School for Design, Pratt Institute, New York University’s Tisch School of Arts and New York School of Interior Design.

Their light studies and those from other Fordham students who entered will be on display starting Thursday, March 10 at the Push Pin Gallery, on the ground floor of the Lowenstein Center, at the Lincoln Center campus.

"The Heart of a Confident Man" by Shane Moan

"Perspective Counts" by Andrew Koudlai

—Patrick Verel

Van Hughes, FCLC '05, Stars in "American Idiot"

Van Hughes, a 2005 alumnus of Fordham University’s Theatre Program, has landed the role of Johnny in the Broadway production of American Idiot, the theatrical adaptation of Green Day’s rock opera of the same name.

“I’d been waiting in the wings, as they say, for about a year,” said Hughes, who had been an understudy for the musical's three lead characters—Johnny, Tunny and Will—and whose Broadway credits include 9 to 5: The Musical and Hairspray. “It really taught me a lot about rolling with the punches, and never knowing what you’re going to get."

In the show, Johnny is a disaffected youth, fed up with the trappings of modern suburbia. He moves to the city and quickly loses himself in sex, drugs and rock and roll, while his friend, Tunny, enlists in the military. A second friend, Will, languishes in the trio’s hometown, Jingletown, USA, raising a child with his girlfriend, Heather.

“It's about people searching for meaning, like all shows,” he said. “It’s about these kids trying to figure out the next steps forward in a post-9/11 world.”

After studying musical theater at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk, Va., Hughes wanted to explore the craft of acting in full—which is how he ended up at Fordham.

"One of the main things I learned at Fordham,” he said, “was the importance of physical actions. You have to use your body to tell a story. Someone in the back row needs to understand the story by the way your body is positioned. I have to show [my character] is working something out while singing lyrics that aren’t necessarily expressing that.

“I combine what I learned at both schools for what I do every night on stage.”

In addition to his Broadway credits, Hughes has appeared in the films Sex And The City: The Movie, Sex and the City 2, Tenure and Rachel Getting Married.

His first official performance as Johnny was Tuesday, March 1, at the St. James Theatre.

For tickets or more information, click here.

—Miles Doyle, FCRH ’01

FCLC Alumna Explains How Online Gaming Will Help Save The World

Online gaming is a multibillion-dollar business, trailing only the film industry in popularity and financial might.

But according to Jane McGonigal, Ph.D., FCLC ’99, the industry and gamers themselves have the potential to do something even Hollywood cannot. They can help solve some of the world’s most challenging problems.

“Gaming can help you make yourself better and help change the world,” McGonigal said on Feb. 2, during the inaugural lecture in Fordham College at Lincoln Center’s Industry Leadership Series. “I want to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games.”

For McGonigal, a member of O Magazine’s 2010 Power List, this is hardly idle chatter.

In 2009, she helped launch World Without Oil, a simulation designed to let players imagine—and avert—a catastrophic global oil shortage.

More recently, she created EVOKE, a 10-week online game that encouraged players to become social entrepreneurs. She said people from 130 countries participated in the game (which she created with support from the World Bank) and ultimately started more than 50 companies to address critical issues, such as poverty, hunger and access to clean water.

Massively multiplayer online games such as these encourage international collaborations and generate collective intelligence, McGonigal said, which can be used to help improve the quality of life around the world.

She singled out a number of online games, including Foldit, an interactive game designed by researchers at the University of Washington that asks participants to solve protein-folding puzzles. Scientists then use gamers’ solutions to design new proteins to help treat and cure specific diseases.

McGonigal said she wrote Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press, 2010) to examine in greater detail the cognitive and behavioral science behind games.

During her lecture, she discussed eustress, or positive stress. Although there is no physiological difference between positive and negative stress, eustress motivates people and allows them to meet self-imposed goals and expectations.

“If we create our own stress, if we create our own obstacles, we feel like we’re in an optimal state,” she said. “We want to tackle these challenges. We’re in a positive state of being.”

She then showed the audience several portraits of gamers in positive states of being—showing what she called their Epic Win Face.

“These are the faces we want to see when we tackle the world’s toughest problems,” she said. “I want people to make [this face] in the real world and not just in a virtual world.”

As director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future, McGonigal and her colleagues work to create Epic Win futures, “the insanely positive outcome that was so implausible you never thought you could do it.”

“We decide what kind of future we want to create,” she said. “What is the best case scenario.”

Her Epic Win future? She wants to see a game designer earn a Nobel Peace Prize by 2023.

“This is hard to imagine,” she said, “if you only think of games as escapist.”

The Fordham College at Lincoln Center Industry Leadership Series invites distinguished FCLC alumni to campus to speak about their profession or field of expertise.

—Miles Doyle

(Photo by Bruce Gilbert)

Fordham Senior to Receive Ethics Award at White House

Joseph Vignone, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center senior, is going to the White House to meet President Barack Obama.

The Fordham theology and history double major won the nationally renowned 2010 Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics last summer. He is slated to receive the award at an upcoming ceremony, date pending, with the President and the handful of other student runners-up and honorable mentions.

Also present at the awards ceremony will be 82-year-old Elie Wiesel, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor, whose Foundation for Humanity created the prize in 1989.

The prize is given to a college junior or senior annually for an essay that articulates an ethical issue, often of a religious or political nature. Vignone, who is also earning a minor in Middle Eastern Studies, won for his essay examining the choices of good vs. evil, as illustrated through the story of Iblis, an angelic figure in Islamic theology.

The Staten Island native was mentored by his advisor Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D., associate professor of theology and associate chair for undergraduate studies and co-founding director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Program, and by Kathryn Kueny, Ph.D., clinical associate professor of theology.

While Vignone is in Washington, he will also meet fellow Fordhamite John O. Brennan (FCRH ‘77), chief counterterrorism advisor to President Obama.

Brennan, who spent 25 years in the CIA before receiving his White House appointment, meets with the President for a daily intelligence briefing.

—Janet Sassi

Lincoln Center of the Past Resurrected in Student Presentation

Long before the area between West 60th and 66th streets became home to Fordham University, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Amsterdam Houses, the beat of life was very different.

On Tuesday, December 7, members of the Fordham College Lincoln Center Honors Program’s class of 2013 described just how different things were. The Lincoln Square History Project, a presentation culled from 61 essays and 400 pictures, explored historical facts that are both well known (Condemnation of 17 blocks of tenement buildings lead to the sites’ construction) and less known (McMahon Hall was once the site of the Grace Institute, a school Sisters of Charity-run school for underprivileged girls).

The School of Law? It was once the site of the 12th Regiment Armory, built in the late 19th century for the then enormous sum $750,000.

“These two buildings serve to show the character of this space before Robert Moses’ urban renewal. Think of the demographic that we serve today. A private institution, and a well to do performing arts center, and think of the buildings that became before, and it may be said, that truly this space could not have changed more under Robert Moses’ direction,” said Max Slade.

Dan Mallia admitted that he was disturbed by the readings about protests that preceded the bulldozing of the neighborhood.

“It was a tough subject to wrap my mind around, because I naturally sympathized with the residents and the lawyer of who lead the resistance,” he said, noting that the proponents of “urban renewal” were case as villains.

“I’m in the midst of my second year at Fordham, and I have yet to find any evidence that Fordham is an evil corporation which revels in displacing poor residents. In fact, I found a lot of evidence to the contrary. A lot of the administration expressed concern that the process should not be abusive and should actually help the area. Furthermore, it is even harder for our generation to feel anger about the renewal, because today we are enjoying the benefits of it.”

The Amsterdam Houses, which were built in 1947 on the other side of Amsterdam Avenue, were constructed in place of demolished tenements, and like the Lincoln Center itself, faced a numerous obstacles. From the start, tensions were high, as residents mistakenly assumed that like Stuyvesant Town, it would exclude black residents. It also didn’t help that, under the theory that more light and air, the better a family will fare, all the homes of in the neighborhood were destroyed.

“They also demolished the storefronts they frequented, the neighborhood hangouts that they were used to hanging out in, and they also demolished everything that made the community what it was. So people began to feel isolated and disoriented,” said Annemarie Gundel.
The Center has seen its ups and downs too. Avery Fisher Hall, Darrya Rosikhina noted, was finished in 1962 after three years of construction, but had such poor acoustics, that it had to be completely gutted and rebuilt nearly from scratch in 1973.

The Juilliard School building, which was completed in 1969 and is home to Alice Tully Hall, has been called a marriage of form and function, but Jacqueline Battaglia noted that the New York City Opera and the New York Philharmonic were given venues that were of lesser quality than the New York City Center and Carnegie Hall, where they came from, respectively.

“In 1959, the owners of Carnegie Hall refused to renew the Philharmonics’ lease, because they were thinking about demolishing the building to build a more profitable office building,” she said.

Still, like Fordham and the Amsterdam Houses, the she said that Lincoln Center has become an integral part of the city’s fabric.

“Despite how and why they ended up at Lincoln Center, or how they changed the Lincoln Square neighborhood once they got here, these arts institutions are an essential part of the culture of New York City,” she said. “They all began here, some almost 200 years ago, and they continue to be some of the most important arts institutions in New York today.”

—Patrick Verel

Lecture to Dig Deep into Lincoln Center’s Rich History

The area surrounding Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus has a wealth of history that is easy to miss. But in a lecture “The Lincoln Square Project,” students from the Lincoln Center campus Honor’s Program will detail the beginnings of the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, the Amsterdam Houses, the Upper West Side and Fordham’s own eight acre campus, which was established in 1961.

The lecture is sponsored by the Fordham University Lincoln Center Honors’ Program.

When: Tuesday, Dec. 7 at 6 p.m.
Where: Cafeteria Atrium, Lowenstein Center
Contact: Ines Montero, (212) 636-6300

—Patrick Verel

Fordham Shatters Silence at ‘Take Back the Night’ Event

On Oct. 21, the Fordham community took back the night.

About 65 students, alumni and faculty members, as well as several speakers and other supporters, gathered in the wind on Robert Moses Plaza for the third annual “Take Back the Night” event at Fordham. The vigil and forum gives voice to the survivors of sexual, domestic, and LGBTQ-related violence.

The event was sponsored by Isis, a student organization at the Lincoln Center campus that facilitates discussions on feminist aspects of the political, intellectual and cultural climates of the world.

Students shared stories about their experiences and stories about family members and friends who were victims of violence. In addition, several students performed music focused on the themes of love, compassion, support and putting an end to hate.

Fordham faculty in attendance included Keith Eldredge, dean of students at the Lincoln Center campus; Vincent DeCola, S.J.; Sofia Bautista Pertuz, assistant dean and director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs; and Margaret Schwartz, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies and the Isis faculty adviser.

Ten speakers from outside the Fordham community joined in the discussion about violence. They shared their experiences of living through violence and working with organizations that try to curb violence.

The vigil ended with a student reading Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise.”

Following the forum was a debriefing session facilitated by psychologists from Counseling and Psychological Services at the Lincoln Center campus. Topics of discussion included gender violence and not blaming the victim.

—Jenny Hirsch

FCLC Alumna on the Power of Play

Jane McGonigal, FCLC '99, has made the 2010 O Power List, published in the September 14 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine.

The Berkeley Ph.D. and game designer knows something about the power of play, and she says "There's a misconception that people play video games to relax. Nothing could be further from the truth."

See Jane McGonigal: The power of play, and her FORDHAM Magazine profile, "Jane McGonigal: Real Gamer" (downloadable PDF).

Double Alum Honored for Work with Student Press

Adam Goldstein (FCLC '99, LAW '02), attorney advocate at the Student Law Center, is being spotlighted as one of "10 individuals who have mattered most to college media over the past academic year," by College Media Matters.

"If you are a college administrator who likes to grind kids under your boot, Adam Goldstein is your worst nightmare," says Frank LoMonte. "He is a ferocious and relentless advocate, and if you try to argue with him, he will quickly expose you for a fool. Adam will admit that he’s a bit of a scary-looking guy– it doesn’t help that he dresses head-to-toe in black every day– but you have nothing to fear from him unless you’re intentionally hurting kids."

Goldstein is a former editor-in-chief of The Observer, and worked as a freelance producer and editor for FoxNews.com for three years.