Fordham Nightly News Now Seen All Over the Bronx

Fordham Nightly News (FNN), the on-campus broadcast journalism club, is now airing a new show off campus via a Bronx public television network.

Bronx residents can watch the FNN show, Eye on Fordham, on BronxNet, said Jonathan Sanders, Ph.D., the club's advisor.

The show features faculty and student interviews as well as features on athletics and other programs at Fordham. Eye on Fordham began broadcasting on Jan. 26, joining several universities that broadcast off campus into their local communities.

-Gina Vergel

Iron & Wine Perform on WFUV

Iron & Wine Perform on The Whole Wide World With Rita Houston
Friday, February 4 | 7 p.m.

New York, NY — Before their sold out concert at Radio City Music Hall last weekend, Iron & Wine visited WFUV’s Studio A for an exclusive session with Music Director Rita Houston. Iron & Wine’s new CD, Kiss Each Other Clean, is another step in the beautiful journey of Sam Beam's poetic songs. In Studio A, he talked about his songwriting process, his love of Edie Brickell, his five daughters and his dogs. Hear the entire session, with a four-song acoustic performance tonight, February 4, at 7 p.m. on The Whole Wide World with Rita Houston and see a bit in this video performance of “Tree by the River” on the WFUV YouTube Channel at www.youtube.com/WFUVRADIO.

The Whole Wide World With Rita Houston airs on WFUV, 90.7 FM in New York City and at www.wfuv.org around the world.

Every Friday night from 7 - 10 p.m. EST, the genre-melding Whole Wide World showcases Rita Houston’s famously wide ranging musical tastes. Perhaps the only place on the New York radio dial where one can hear Nancy's Sinatra's "Bang Bang" and Manu Chao's "Bongo Bong" on the same show, WWW mixes rock, pop, world, electronica, lounge, soul and dance tunes into a mellow Friday night soundtrack, punctuated with interviews and in-studios performances

WFUV is a non-commercial, listener-supported public radio station, licensed to Fordham University for more than 60 years. Serving the New York area as well as an international audience on the web, and a leader in contemporary music radio, WFUV is Rock & Roots Radio, offering an eclectic mix of rock, singer-songwriters, blues, world and other music, plus headlines from National Public Radio and local news.

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)

Studying Shakespeare in London

Students and faculty on learning and performing Shakespeare at Fordham's London Dramatic Academy (LDA).



LDA is a fully accredited, 14-week intensive theatre programme at the Fordham University London Centre in Kensington Square (located at Heythrop College, University of London). March 1 is the application deadline for Fall 2011. The most up-to-date application forms are available at: www.fordham.edu/LDA. Completed forms can be emailed to LDA@fordham.edu.

Gabelli School of Business Kicks Off International Business Week

New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin will headline Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business’ International Business Week with an appearance at the Rose Hill campus on Tuesday, Feb. 8 at 7 p.m.

Sorkin, the author of Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System -- and Themselves (Viking, 2009) will speak at the McGinley Ballroom.

Too Big to Fail, which details the backroom machinations behind the financial crisis of 2008, won the Gerald Loeb best business book of the year award in 2010. It is also the source for a currently in production HBO film starring Paul Giamatti as U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

International Business Week also features the following events:

Meet International Students at Fordham: Sunday, February 6 at 4 p.m. McGinley Ballroom

Social Business Fair Trade Market: Wednesday, Feb. 9 at 4 p.m. O’Keefe Commons

Global Etiquette Dinner: Thursday, Feb. 10 at 6 p.m. Tognino Hall, Duane Library

For more information and registration, visit the Gabelli School of Business blog.

—Patrick Verel

Fordham Professor Tapped for US2010

Emily Rosenbaum, Ph.D., professor of sociology, is one of 26 researchers who have been chosen from universities all over the United States to participate in a new report on changes in American society, as reflected in the 2010 census.

US2010, Discover America in a New Century, is being funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and coordinated through Brown University. The project, a two-year study which will culminate with a book, got underway when the 2010 census showed virtually no change since 2000 in black and white segregation in the housing markets.

Rosenbaum, a housing inequality expert and author of The Housing Divide: How Generations of Immigrants Fare in New York’s Housing Markets (New York University Press, 2006), will be heading up the research on “How We Are Housed.” Drawing from a few different sources of data, Rosenbaum will analyze recent trends and differentials in home ownership, and housing and neighborhood quality, for the decade 2000-2010.

“Home ownership is widely recognized as a barometer of the U.S. population’s and economy’s well being,” wrote Rosenbaum. “And thus has long been integral to policy making.”

But home ownership, she said, was only “part of the total picture.” Neighborhood safety, access to services such as good schools, and a deteriorating housing unit can adversely affect quality of life and health, she said.

“The persistence of racial/ethnic differentials in housing and neighborhood quality may be a partial explanation for [the] continued patterns of inequality,” said Rosenbaum.

What was surprising about the U.S. 2010 census is that the recent decade of stagnation in black-white segregation followed two decades (1980s, 1990s) of growing diversity. Why has it stopped? This is one of the things the study will look at.

Beyond housing, said John Logan, Ph.D., professor of sociology at Brown and director of US2010, the concluding publication will include studies on immigration, segregation, economics, education, aging and the changing American family, among others.

“US2010 . . . tackles questions of change in American society not from the perspective of one scholar or one topic, but with the expertise of a nationwide team of scholars who were brought together for this purpose,” he said.

—Janet Sassi

Alumni and Friends of Fordham Dominate at 2011 Irish America Hall of Fame

When Irish America magazine celebrates the inductees at the 2011 Irish America Hall of Fame awards luncheon on March 15, Fordham alumni and friends will be a big part of the proceedings.

The ceremony at the New York Yacht Club will honor Dr. Kevin Cahill, FCRH '57, director of Fordham's Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs; bestselling author Mary Higgins Clark, FCLC '79, grand marshal of this year’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan; William J. Flynn, GSAS '51, chairman emeritus of Mutual of America, and champion of the Irish peace process in his role as chairman of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy; and diplomat Jean Kennedy Smith, who received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Fordham in 1995 (the same year Mary Robinson, then president of Ireland, delivered the commencement address).

Honorees Denis Kelleher, founder and CEO of Wall Street Access, and Chuck Feeney, Irish American billionaire philanthropist, also have close ties to the University. They are being honored along with James Watson, Ph.D., co-discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA (for which he received a Nobel Prize in 1962), and Michael Flatley, choreographer and dancer, and the creator of The Lord of the Dance.

The Irish America Hall of Fame honors “the extraordinary achievements of Irish-American leaders — from their significant accomplishments and contributions to American society, to their personal commitment to safeguarding their Irish heritage and the betterment of Ireland.” Irish America magazine has been in print for more than a quarter century, and is a leading publication of Irish interest in North America.

Marketing Professor Wins Outstanding Teacher Award

Assistant Professor of Marketing Luke Kachersky, Ph.D., has been awarded the 2011 Outstanding Marketing Teacher of the Year Award by the Academy of Marketing Science (AMS).

The academy cited Kachersky for his teaching, use of technology in the classroom, and assessments of student learning based on recommendations from peers, students and administrators.

“Luke does not just teach his students in the sense of imparting knowledge,” said Dawn Lerman, Ph.D., associate professor and area chair of marketing. “He also seeks to reach them and to engage them in ways that will benefit their classroom learning but also serve them outside of the classroom.”

This is not the first accolade Kachersky has received for his teaching abilities. He was honored in 2010 with the Cura Personalis Award for challenging students while providing them support to excel. He also earned the Marketing Area Teaching Excellence Award for 2009.

Among his many—and perhaps less official, noteworthy achievements—Kachersky has won praise from his students for his approach to teaching marketing research. That staple of marketing programs is, said Lerman, “notoriously feared by students and one that yields lower than average evaluations, regardless of the instructor.”

Kachersky reverses the teaching progression so that students learn data analysis before research design, allowing them to understand and appreciate nuances of the entire research process. He also incorporates social media into his courses to provide students with an understanding of how such media provide market insights.

“Ours is a dynamic field, perhaps the most among all courses of study in higher education,” Kachersky said. “We, as marketing professors, are charged with an insurmountable task of making sense of a field that changes continuously. If we embrace the process and the burden of struggling with this task, we can deliver much value to our students, enabling them to confront similarly unresolvable issues in their lives and careers.”

In addition to his teaching load, Kachersky is a busy scholar with two papers scheduled for publication this year: “Do Moniker Maladies Afflict Name Letter Brands? A Dual Process Theory of Name Letter Branding and Avoidance Effects” in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; and “The Role of Wireless Service Provider Trust on Consumer Acceptance of SMS Advertising,” co-authored with his Fordham colleague, Assistant Professor of Marketing Sertan Kabadayi, Ph.D., in the International Journal of Internet Marketing and Advertising.

Kachersky is also one of the driving forces, along with Lerman and Associate Professor of Marketing Marcia Flicker, Ph.D., behind Fordham’s newest research center, the Center for Positive Marketing. The center studies marketing from the demand (consumers’) as opposed to the supply (marketers’) perspective.

Kachersky joined the Fordham business faculty in 2008 after receiving his doctorate from Baruch College of the City University of New York. He will receive his award, and make a presentation on his classroom success, in May at the AMS Annual Conference in Coral Gables, Fla.

--Syd Steinhardt

Reflections on the “Lost” Conference

Tom Beaudoin, Ph.D., associate professor of practical theology, wrote a blog on the conference held at Fordham University this past weekend on Twenty-Somethings and the Church: Lost?, where he hosts a link to a video made by lay ministers on what the twenty-somethings in attendance thought of the conference theme.

You can view it here.

Political Science Professor Wins Book Award

Assistant Professor of Political Science Robert J. Hume, Ph.D., has won the 2010 Alpha Sigma Nu Book Award for his book, "How Courts Impact Federal Administrative Behavior" (Routledge-Taylor & Francis, 2009).

Hume was one of only four winners in the professional studies category, out of 42 entries from 16 Jesuit institutions. The awards are given annually by the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, and the Alpha Sigma Nu Honor Society.

"For legal scholars and politicians who are interested in the 'art of the possible,' and ordinary citizens who care about persuasive writing, this book might very well be considered required reading," said one of the judges, in part.

"I am thrilled to win a national book award," said Hume, "but I take special pride in being recognized by a Jesuit honor society at the national level."

Hume is a graduate of the College of the Holy Cross. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2003, and came to Fordham in 2005. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of constitutional law, the judicial process, and public administration, with particular emphasis on the implementation of court decisions.

-- Syd Steinhardt