Nine Days that Changed the World

Nine Days that Changed the World

A documentary film about Pope John Paul II's historic trip to Poland in June 1979, hosted by Newt and Callista Gingrich.

Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Keating First | Keating Hall
Rose Hill Campus | Fordham University
6-7 p.m. | Reception | Keating Rotunda
7-8:30 p.m. | Film Screening and Remarks by Executive
Producers and Hosts Newt and Callista Gingrich | Keating First
8:30-9 p.m. | Book and DVD Signing | Keating Rotunda

RSVP to the Office of Special Events
at specialevnts@fordham.edu or (212) 636-6575 by 7 February 2011.

Nine Days that Changed the World
Newt and Callista Gingrich’s newest documentary, Nine Days that Changed the World, is a powerful story of freedom through faith. This groundbreaking film recounts Pope John Paul II’s historic nine-day trip to Poland in June of 1979, and reveals why this visit was the turning point for defeating Communism in Eastern Europe.

During these nine days, Pope John Paul II reminded the Polish people that nothing—not even the seemingly all-powerful Communist state—could stand between them and God. The pope sparked a revolution of conscience in the Polish people that led to the success of Solidarity’s free-trade union movement, and ultimately the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union.

Be the Evidence You Want to See

Mahatma Ghandi famously said ‘Be the change you want to see in the world.”

Eleanor Roosevelt, in her speech to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, said “Where do human rights begin? In small places, close to home . . . the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm or office where he works.””

Tina Maschi, Ph.D., assistant professor of social work in the Graduate School of Social Service, is taking those concepts and applying them to a new lecture series at the Lincoln Center campus. Maschi, through her position as a 2010 Hartford Foundation scholar, has launched the Be The Evidence project at Fordham—a series of lectures and workshops designed to improve individual and community responses to today’s most critical social issues.

The first event on Feb. 8 features Thomas Larson, LSCW, a clinical social worker and federal probation officer, speaking on how to work with “involuntary” clients (i.e. persons who are forced into therapy, such as prisoners or juvenile offenders.) Several other events will follow over the course of the year.

Maschi said she was inspired to do the series by current debates in social work and other social service professions on how human rights and social justice can be realized. Whether in social work, medicine or psychology, whether a counselor, a scientist or a reformer, Maschi suggests we all ask ourselves whether we, ourselves, are “evidence” that the changes we’ve wanted to see have come about.

“We as humans tend to externalize problems as if they are outside of ourselves,” said Maschi. “In order to change these external problems or social ills, the change must start from within– if I want to combat oppression, have I carefully examined myself to eradicate any ways in which my actions oppress others?”

The inaugural lecture will be Feb. 8 at 7:30 in Room 713 of the Lowenstein Center on the Lincoln Center campus. The next event, on torture in U.S. prisons, will be March 17.

—Janet Sassi

WFUV's "Words & Music From Studio A" in February

Words & Music From Studio A
Monday through Thursday at 9 P.M. on WFUV (90.7 FM, wfuv.org)

(Take Five, a 5-minute version of each evening’s interview, airs every day at 7:40 A.M. and 4:45 P.M. and is available to download as podcast at www.wfuv.org/audio/podcast )

Tuesday, February 1st—The man with the giant voice known as The White Buffalo will join The Alternate Side’s Russ Borris to talk blues and rock & roll.

Wednesday February 2nd—Multi-talented singer-songwriter Sonya Kitchell joins Sunday Breakfast host John Platt in the studio before her Rockwood Music Hall show on February 9th.

Thursday, February 3rd—Former New Pornographer Neko Case talks to FUV Music Morning host Claudia Marshall before taking the stage at two NY-area concerts—Westha.m.pton Beach Performing Arts Center on February 5th and the Bell House on February 6th.

Friday, February 4th—Toronto’s Dia.m.ond Rings, aka John O, heads to the WFUV studios to chat with The Alternate Side’s Alisa Ali about his modern brand of gla.m. rock.

Monday February 7th—Texan, songwriter and constant performer Alejandro Escovedo sits down with Claudia Marshall before his big 60th birthday show at City Winery.

Tuesday. February 8th—Grammy-winning jazz great Kurt Elling joins WFUV Music Director Rita Houston to talk about the release of his new album, “The Gate," followed by an FUV Live concert from Avatar Studios.

Wednesday, February 9th—Lissie, the folk rocker Paste Magazine called the best new solo artist of 2010 talks to Alisa Ali. The interview is followed by Lissie’s recent Hiro Ballroom concert.

Thursday, February 10th—New Yorker and long-time FUV favorite Nellie McKay sits down with her early champion, Rita Houston, to talk about music and life before her show at Tilles Center for the Performing Arts on February 12th. Followed by FUV Live: Nellie McKay from City Winery.

Friday, February, 11th—Erland and The Carnival, the London folk rock supergroup comprised of Simon Tong, Gawain Erland Cooper and David Nock, join Alisa Ali for an interview and performance session.

Monday, February 14th—British-American folk prince Teddy Thompson talks to Claudia Marshall on Valentine’s Day.

Tuesday, February 15th—Mountain Man, which is actually three women, come to Studio A for a chat with Rita Houston.

Wednesday, February 16th—Philadelphia band Dr. Dog make it to New York to play Terminal 5 on February 18th, but first they talk to WFUV’s Claudia Marshall.

Thursday, February 17th—Alt-country forefathers The Jayhawks join longtime fan Rita Houston for an interview and performance session.

Friday, February 18th—Avant-pop disco experimenters The Hundreds In The Hands talk to the equally avant Alisa Ali.

WFUV (90.7 FM, wfuv.org) 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.

History Professor Wins Award For Textbook

Saul Cornell can now add another title to his resume: award-winning textbook author.

Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, shared Pearson Higher Education's "Product Team of the Year" Award with his co-authors, Jennifer Keane of Chapman University and Edward T. O'Donnell of the College of the Holy Cross, for Visions of America: A History of the United States.

The award is given annually by Person Higher Education's social sciences and arts division. It recognizes the collaborative efforts of the authors, and the production, editorial and marketing teams responsible for making a book successful.

"The book is innovative in that it uses images to provide historical narrative," said Maureen E. Prado Roberts, Pearson Higher Education’s marketing manager for history.

Though Pearson does not release sales figures for its books, Prado Roberts said that "Visions of America" has been adopted by more than 200 institutions. A second edition is planned for 2011, she said.

-- Syd Steinhardt

Going with the Flow . . . in More Snow

Oh groan, not again! Yes, more January snow fell on the metropolitan area late Wednesday, forcing a delayed opening on the Fordham campuses.

Some undaunted students and faculty made the most of it.

(Photos by Nicholas Lombardi, S.J.)

Former Jailhouse Lawyer Shares Insights on Pro Se Litigation

As a young man, an armed Shon Hopwood robbed five banks in rural Nebraska, netting some $200,000.

Luckily for him, and a score of terrified bank tellers, he got caught.

Hopwood went to federal prison in 1999 with a 13-year sentence; it was there that Hopwood turned his life around.

He got a job in the prison law library because it paid more than working in the kitchen. He trained himself in Supreme Court litigation, and built a national reputation as a jailhouse lawyer before he was released in 2009.

During his eleven-year incarceration, Hopwood wrote more than 20 petitions for certorari to the U.S. Supreme Court, and helped on between 50 and 100 appeals, motions and other documents - enabling a number of inmates to win sentence reductions. One of his cases, Fellers v. United States, was even adopted by Seth P. Waxman, former United States solicitor general.

Hopwood is currently writing an article for the Fordham Law Review. He spoke at Fordham Law School on Jan. 25 about obstacles that pro se litigants face in trying to advance a case.

“The increase in pro se litigation during these difficult economic times is pretty well documented,” Hopwood said. “There is nothing that will place pro se claimants on an even level with attorney representation. But just because they do not have an attorney doesn’t mean they don’t have a claim.”

Hopwood would know; today, he works at Cockle Printing in Omaha, which he says is the only printing house in the nation that works with pro se litigants. When a pro se brief comes in, he helps prepare it.

He also publishes A De Novo Review, a newsletter for inmates on the latest legal developments.

Hopwood outlined three remedies to help level the playing field for pro se litigants, especially for inmates:
-- modify the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (passed by Congress in 1996 as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America) to allow non-capital offense prisoners more than just one year to file a legal challenge to their conviction;
-- modify the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which has added case restrictions on prisoners who sue for violations of their rights, including a controversial “exhaustion requirement” which prohibits inmates from suing unless they have used all “administrative remedies” available to them;
-- educate pro se litigants in their chances and their filing obligations, including setting up online tools to assist them and providing sample petitions. Most pro se litigants, said Hopwood, don’t understand the odds that are against them.

“There is much demagoguery around prisoner issues in this country,” said Hopwood. “You never hear politicians say, ‘let’s rethink these policies’ – because that talk doesn’t get you elected and labels you soft on crime.”

He also advocates more “ghost writing” of pro se legal briefs by paralegals. "That's a win-win situation in these economic times," he said.

Hopwood’s article will come out in the Law Review in December; in the meantime, Hopwood has applied to Fordham School of Law, hoping to practice prisoners’ rights law one day.

—Janet Sassi

Fordham Track Great to Be Honored at the New York Athletic Club

Fordham track great Tom Courtney (FCRH ’55) will be honored at “Millrose Olympians Night” on Thursday, Jan. 27, at the New York Athletic Club in Manhattan.

Courtney, who is among the greatest track athletes Fordham ever produced, will be honored along with eight other Olympic Gold medalists in track & field. All honorees have competed in the Millrose Games, which take place on Friday, Jan. 28, at Madison Square Garden.

While at Fordham, Courtney was on two-mile team, which set the World Record in California in 1954. The next year, he graced the cover of Sports Illustrated in his Fordham gear.

After graduating from Fordham, Courtney made the Olympic team and took first-place, winning the gold medal and setting an Olympic record in the 800 meter run at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. He also anchored the 4 X 400 relay for a second gold medal.

Courtney went on to set many other world records in 1956 and 1957 before retiring from competition. He later became assistant track coach at Harvard for one year before obtaining his M.B.A. from Harvard Business. Courtney was inducted into the Fordham Athletics Hall of Fame in 1971.

Fellow alumnus, Norbert Sander, M.D., (FCRH ’64), will host the reception along with officers from the New York Athletic Club. Sander, the 1974 winner of the New York City Marathon, is the architect of a modern initiative that brought running back to life at Manhattan’s 168th Street Armory, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2010.

A significant contingent of one of Fordham’s greatest Track & Field squads, Classes 1963-65, will hold a reunion at the 104th edition of the Millrose Games at the Garden on Friday night to celebrate Fordham’s rich history of success in these historic Games.

—Gina Vergel

Two Members of Fordham English Faculty Receive NEH Awards

Two members of Fordham’s English faculty have been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.

John Bugg, Ph.D., assistant professor and director of placement and professional development in the department of English, is the recipient of a NEH Faculty Fellowship for research on “Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism.”

During the tenure of the fellowship, Bugg said he plans to "complete the research and writing of his study of the relationship between British literary culture and political repression in the decade after the French Revolution."

Edward Cahill, Ph.D., assistant professor of English and acting director of the American Studies program, was awarded a NEH Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

Cahill will work on his project, "Colonial Rising: Narratives of Upward Mobility in British America," which argues that “cultures of social and economic self-transformation in 17th- and 18th-century anglophone colonial America were defined not by coherent visions of an ‘American Dream’ but rather by diverse expressions of aspiration, ambivalence, and hostility.

“By exploring stories and discourses of wealth acquisition and class mobility in colonial New England, the mid-Atlantic, the South, and the West Indies, I seek to shed historical light on the early representational forms of ambition, adventure, risk, movement, and change—values that, in the 21st century more than ever, shape and reflect our culture's ideological assumptions and social practices,” Cahill said.

To read about what other Fordham faculty members have been up to, check out the “People” section of Inside Fordham on the Fordham website. This section, which contains faculty awards, honors and more, is updated in every new issue of Inside Fordham.

—Gina Vergel

Fordham a Strong Presence in Presidential Management Fellowship Competition

Back in October, 2010, 9,100 graduate students from around the country applied to become Presidential Management Fellows. Of those, only 1,530 made it through the rigorous selection process to become semi-finalists, and ten of them hail from Fordham.

Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., associate professor of Economics and Director of the Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development (IPED), noted that the percentage of Fordham students who have made it this far (10 out of 39, or 26 percent) is much higher than the national average of 17 percent.

With five semi-finalists hailing from the School of Law, three from IPED, one from the Graduate School of Education (G.S.E.) and one from the Graduate School of Business Administration (G.B.A.), Fordham is well-positioned for one of the country’s most prestigious fellowships.

“The presidential management fellowship program is the flagship leadership development program for the federal government. It attracts and selects the best candidates coming out of America’s graduate schools,” he said. “It is designed to develop a cadre of potential government leaders for the future.”

The process of becoming a fellow is one that finishes in March, when 900 finalists are offered jobs within the federal government. Schwalbenberg noted that the final round of the process, which is taking place right now, involves a full day of interviews and observations in Washington D.C.

The payoff for such a grueling process is a two-year long fast track into the agencies that make the executive branch function. Former students who have completed the fellowship have gone on to work in the International Trade Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department, the Foreign Agricultural Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“The aim is that towards the end of their career, these will be the leaders of the Civil Service,” Schwalbenberg said. “So they won’t be the political appointees, but they’ll be the people who actually run the bureaucracy for the different secretaries and political appointees.”

—Patrick Verel

Sargent Shriver’s Fordham Legacy

In February 1962, Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps visited Fordham’s Rose Hill campus and told more than 700 students that the function of the volunteer program is “to make a substantial contribution to humanity and to world peace,” The Ram reported. (Download the original article as a PDF.)

“We are in a struggle,” he said. “The traditional, ordinary, pedestrian way of doing things has got to be junked.”

While it’s impossible to know how many Fordham students Sargent inspired that day, or on subsequent visits, his words did make a lasting impression on at least one. Ann Sheehan, UGE ’65, executive director of Pennsylvania’s BCTV and a former Peace Corp volunteer, applied for the program immediately after Shriver’s address.

She posted about Shriver’s visit to Rose Hill on her station’s blog, two days after Shriver died at the age of 95.

“The idea of the Peace Corps had intrigued me since it was first talked about, and although I don't remember anything specific that he said, Sarge hooked me completely. There were applications available right there, in the gym, and I made my friend wait for me while I filled it out, never dreaming that I would be accepted.”

As director of the Peace Corps, Shriver capitalized on the new and exciting spirit of volunteerism President Kennedy inspired in the nation, especially its younger citizens. Within a few years, thousands of young Americans were working in poor countries around the world.

Shriver’s Rose Hill appearance was part of the University’s American Age Lecture Series, which strives to embody the spirit of the Fordham community through programs that educate, stimulate and enhance the college experience.

—Miles Doyle

Edited 1/24, 09:39: The date in the first sentence was changed from 1964 to 1962, thanks to a tip from "That Guy" (see comments below). BH