IPED Alumni News: Jason Gehrig

Jason Gehrig, IPED Class of 2009, presented the results of his book, Water and Conflict, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, January 6, 2010.

Ken Hackett, president of Catholic Relief Services, introduced Gehrig to an overflow audience. The session was filmed by C-SPAN for later broadcast (video here). Commenting on Gehrig's work were Tjip Walker, Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation, U.S. Agency for International Development, Professor William E. Hall, from the Conflict Resolution Program at Georgetown University, and Geoff Dabelko, Ph.D., director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center. The moderator of the panel was Dennis Warner of Catholic Relief Services.

Gehrig's book, Water and Conflict, was written with Mark M. Rogers and explores water’s complex role in development and conflict. It finds that water scarcity, access to water supplies, pollution of water sources and transboundary water management increasingly play a role in disputes, political manipulation and, in worst cases, outright conflict. In the course of these disputes, traditional community practices and human rights often are ignored and the natural environment may become degraded. The report challenges the development community to ensure that peacebuilding principles of equity, justice and reconciliation are applied to water conflicts to prevent and, if necessary, mitigate these situations.

During the question and answer period, the World Bank's policy of promoting the privatization of water in Bolivia was discussed. This privatization effort led to the outbreak of violence. Gehrig suggested, that from his experience in Bolivia, community cooperatives might prove more effective in mitigating violence and in providing water to the poor.

Catholic Relief Services published the book and major funding for the research was provided by the U.S. Agency for International Development. While writing the book, Mr. Gehrig was a student in Fordham's Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development (IPED) and the holder of an Arrupe Fellowship.

Jason Gehrig with Mark R. Rogers. Water and Conflict: Incorporating Peacebuiliding into Water Development (Catholic Relief Services—United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Baltimore, 2009).

Photo: Jason Gehrig (L) with Henry Schwalbenberg at book launch.

—Henry Schwalbenberg, Ph.D., Director
Graduate Program in International Political Economy and Development (IPED)

Father Ryan Reports from West Africa (VII): "Planning Ahead"

Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society Patrick J. Ryan, S.J. is spending a month in Africa, a continent where he previously lived for 26 years. During his time there, he will be blogging about his experiences. Here is his latest post:

I am still in Ghana, as I have been since Dec. 28, but will return to Nigeria on Jan. 13 and fly out of Nigeria to New York on the night of Jan. 15. I expect that the search at the airport in Abuja will be more extensive than it was for my flight from Lagos to Accra.

I am reading ahead for next semester, just having finished a book on the ethical and political problems involved in humanitarian assistance. During the spring break I am scheduled to give a course for Fordham's Institute for International Humanitarian Affairs on this topic.

In 1983, various relief agencies flew in supplies to Ghana for half a million Ghanaians deported from Nigeria in January of that year. Among other things, huge army field tents were sent in on the mistaken notion that these deportees would be shelterless. Nobody lacked a relative on whose floor, at least, he or she could sleep, so the huge tents were finally used by solitary night watchmen standing guard at places like the Catholic Secretariat in Accra.

Some of the supplies flown in proved very useful in Ghanaian hospitals, such as baby formula, which was in short supply. On the presumption that I knew Italian (at the time I did not, but have since learned it in Rome), I was asked to come to the staff and student hospital of the University of Ghana to translate the directions on cans. With Latin and French, I managed to figure them out. No one died as a result.

I am also re-reading Lamin Sanneh's fascinating study of the impact of mission on culture, "Translating the Message." The book is assigned for a course I am teaching in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education this spring. Lamin, together with his wife Sandra, have been close friends since 1975 when we were colleagues at the University of Ghana. He and she both teach at Yale now.

I offered mass yesterday evening for Fr. McShane's brother, Jack, who died suddenly on Jan 6. May he rest in peace.

—Pat Ryan, S.J.

Theatre Director Goes Wild

Wild Man, written and performed by Matthew Maguire, director of Fordham's theatre program, debuts on Monday, January 11, 2010, at The Wild Project, in Manhattan.

The show, which "probes ecstasy, runaway horses, the Book of Esdras, smuggling watermelons, and cheatin' death," was produced by The Wild Project in association with Creation Production Company, and has been made possible in part by the New York Foundation for the Arts, which awarded a grant to Matthew Maguire for its creation.

The Wild Project
195 East 3rd Street
(between Avenues A & B)
Mondays and Tuesdays, January 11, 12, 18, 19, 25 and 26 | 8 p.m.
For tickets go to Ovationtix or call (212) 352-3101

Monsignor Quinn on The Debrief with David Ushery

Monsignor Joseph G. Quinn, J.D., J.C.L., vice president for University mission and ministry at Fordham, on the NBC show The Debrief with David Ushery. Monsignor Quinn's co-panelists are Imam Shamsi Ali, head of The Islamic Cultural Center of New York, and Rabbi Joseph Potasnik of Congregation Mount Sinai in Brooklyn Heights. The show aired Sunday, Dec. 27 at noon on WNBC Channel 4.

Fordham’s EMBA Program Gains Another Cohort

Fordham’s Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA) is hot.

For the first time in the history of the Graduate School of Business Administration, there will be four EMBA cohorts running concurrently this spring semester. There are 106 students enrolled in the program, a figure that represents a 135 percent increase since the first EMBA cohort graduated in 2005.

"The strong growth can be attributed to a variety of factors including our strategic recruitment efforts, a yearly increase in student and alumni referrals to our program as well as our rankings in The Wall Street Journal,” said Francis Petit, Ed.D., assistant dean and director of executive programs at GBA. In 2008, the Journal ranked the program 25th in overall excellence compared to similar programs around the world. The newspaper also ranked the program in the top 20 with respect to return on investment among American programs.

The EMBA is an intensive 22-month program that continues to grow in popularity.

“Prospective students are very attracted to Fordham's EMBA Program and our EMBA community," Petit added. “We have been told that we offer a unique, hands-on and personable admissions experience compared to our competitors. We get to know our candidates and the journeys' they have traveled and they get to know what we and our program are all about," he added.

The newest class of 2011 is the second cohort for Fordham Westchester. They are a diverse bunch consisting of 22 students with backgrounds in areas such as finance, pharmaceuticals, real estate, health care, higher education and government.

Cohort Statistics
Number of Executives in Cohort: 22
Mean Age: 33
Mean Years of Work Experience: 11
Percent Male: 68
Percent Female: 32
Percent Full Financial Sponsorship: 20
Percent Partial Financial Sponsorship: 35
Percent Self Sponsored: 45
Mean Salary: $115,000

Titles Represented in Cohort: senior vice president, senior environmental specialist, senior auditor, assistant vice president, operations analyst.

Organizations Represented in Cohort: Credit Suisse, GAMCO Asset Management, Inc., Thomson Reuters, Toll Brothers, Westchester County Department of Environmental Facilities, Con Edison, Yeshiva University and the Westchester County Medical Center.

Academic Institutions Represented in Cohort: Cornell, Brandeis, Lafayette, Villanova, Fordham, LaSalle, Binghamton, Lehman, University of Connecticut and Oklahoma. One student in the cohort was a member of the UCONN Men’s Division I NCAA Basketball Championship Squad.

Eighteen percent of the students in this new cohort were born outside of the United States and hail from Albania, Honduras, Peru and Sweden.

-Gina Vergel

Fordham U. Press E-lated About Ebook Launch

Fordham University Press has launched its first ebook with Barnes & Noble and is planning a total of 100 ebook titles in the near future, press director Fredric Nachbaur has said.

Now available on ebook is one of the Press’ most recent titles, The Rat That Got Away: A Bronx Memoir (Fordham University Press, 2009).

FUP is working with an outside company, codeMantra, to convert additional book files and to deliver them to the Press’ trading partners, which include B&N and Sony. Other initiatives are in the planning to deliver ebooks to libraries, Nachbaur said.

Sales of ebooks in the marketplace still only represent about 1/2 to 1 percent of the U.S. book industry, but that figure is growing rapidly, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum. Most university presses, said Nachbaur, are predicting sales of approximately 2 percent per year, and FUP is hoping for about the same in 2010.

-J.S.

GSE Poet Interviewed on Cable Arts Show

Donna Marie Reale has a lot of irons in the fire. The master’s degree candidate in Fordham’s Graduate School of Education is a teacher, a former businesswoman, a longtime Minister of the Word at St. Bartholomew Roman Catholic Church in Elmhurst, N.Y., and a poet. Tonight she’ll be a television star.

Reale will be interviewed by Tammy Nuzzo-Morgan, poet laureate of Suffolk County, on tonight’s TNSPS's Arts Forum, on Cablevision's Channel 20, at 5 p.m. Reale will read from and discuss her poetry on the show, broadcast live from Riverhead, N.Y.

An instructor at Kingsborough Community College, Reale teaches English as a Second Language to adult immigrant students, and is enrolled in The Graduate School of Education’s master of science program in Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL), where she is a member of Phi Kappa Phi. She has a strong interest in linguistics and in preserving languages which are in danger of extinction, and is a member of Arba Sicula (“Sicilian Dawn”) which seeks to preserve the language and culture of Sicily.

Reale has been writing poetry since she was a child, and began reading her work aloud several years ago at the Italian American Poets and Writers Piazza, an annual event at Hofstra University. Much of her work is Christian spiritual in nature.

“We cannot deny the presence and interaction of the Divine in our daily lives and need to share that with others,” she says.

Her poems “The Camper” and “The Message” have been published in The Gospel magazine as well as on the website of Hudson Valley Catholics. Reale has a bachelor of science degree in marketing from St. John’s University.

Departmental Collection Finds a New Home

Fordham’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology is sharing some rare educational material with a Ghanian University.

Working through the Friends of Ghana, a non-profit organization, the department donated a collection of vintage science books and magazines, including the Journal of Science, to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). KNUST services 23,000 undergraduate and graduate students in Agriculture And Natural Resources, Architecture & Planning, Arts And Social Sciences, Engineering, Health Sciences and Science.

The Journal of Science is one of the nation’s longest-running journals covering developments in earth science. The collection will help strengthen the university’s science curriculum and research, according to Friends of Ghana CEO Joseph Johnson.

The donation was arranged with the help of student Kojo Amphah and the department’s chair Allen S. Gilbert, Ph.D., professor of sociology and anthropology. Much of the material comes from Gilbert's personal collection of science publications.

“This is a sizeable collection,” said Gilbert. “Now that everything is digital in the west, this top U.S. science journal is on JSTOR and on line. But in a developing country, institutions often don’t have the instrumentation or the subscription money to access this material digitally. Bound, hard copies are the cheapest and easiest for them.”

Friends of Ghana is sponsoring the shipping and delivery of the books and magazines to the university, located in Kumasi.

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

Father Ryan Reports from West Africa (VI): "New Year and Funerals"

Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society Patrick J. Ryan, S.J. is spending a month in Africa, a continent where he previously lived for 26 years. During his time there, he will be blogging about his experiences. Here is his latest post:

I arrived in Ghana where I lived for 15 years (1974-83 at the University of Ghana, Legon; 1990-96 at the University of Cape Coast) on the evening of Dec. 28. Friends from those days met me at the airport and I stayed in Accra until New Year's Day. I always take any opportunity when I am in Accra to visit Stella Ansah, the widow of a good friend, the late Professor Paul Ansah (who died at the age of 55 in 1993). Paul was both a professor of journalism as well as a talented and acerbic political commentator. Several different military dictatorships in Ghana hated him as a result, and they were not entirely unhappy when he died of complications from diabetes nearly 17 years ago.

During the first four years I was in Ghana, I was the only Jesuit in the country, and my best friends were Paul and Stella. I did not own a television at the time but I would come to their house on certain evenings to watch the news with Paul and get his live commentary on what was going on. Together with Paul and a few others, I was an editorial consultant during those years for the weekly Catholic newspaper, the Standard. It was the only newspaper that would tell the truth about what was going on under the military dictatorship of Ignatius Kutu Acheampong and his colleagues (1972-79) and the so-called "revolutionary" governance of Jerry John Rawlings (15 weeks in 1979 and the whole of 1982-1992), and Rawlings's subsequent elected civilian administration (1992-2000). When fewer restrictions were placed on journalism in Ghana--after a period when the Standard had been suppressed by the government--other newspapers took up the truth-telling function of the Standard and it went back to reporting weddings, funerals and confirmations.

I had hoped to travel 500 miles north for the "final funeral" of an old man who died last February, the aged father of my former student, Samuel Atarah, who is now a professor in the University of the West of Scotland. But transportation within Ghana at this dry, dusty and hot time of the year is difficult, and I am reluctantly reaching the conclusion that I will not be able to travel to the village of Kongo in the Upper East Region of Ghana for the final funeral on Jan. 9. Meanwhile, the lecturer in chemistry at the University of Cape Coast, who is a good friend of mine and of Sam Atarah's since their student days, John Prosper Adotey, with whom I had hoped to travel to Kongo, has lost his own wife, Felicia (aged 43) of a sudden heart attack on Dec 29. I went and sat in condolence with him and some of his relatives and friends on Saturday, Jan. 2. Felicia and John Prosper have two bright children, a 12-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy. Arrangements for Felicia's funeral are not finalized, as yet, but it seems likely to be on Feb. 5. Why the long delay? Many Ghanaian funerals take place a month or more after death. For better or for worse, funerals are the most important social events in Ghana, and there are many complications to be ironed out with Felicia's family, given the unexpected nature of her death.

So the New Year has begun on a solemn and sad note.

-- Pat Ryan, S.J.