Washington, a 1977 graduate of Fordham College at Lincoln Center, said, “This is a 48-year journey for me. Forty-eight years ago, I played Othello at 22, right down the block at Fordham at Lincoln Center. I go past it every day on my way to rehearsal. It’s fascinating to have been too young for the part, and some may say now, too old. Forty-eight years experience, 48 years of pain, pleasure, and life has informed my approach to playing the role.” 

Rose Hill Gym was built in 1925 out of locally quarried gray bedrock—the same stone that supports the towering skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan, nine miles to the south of Fordham’s campus in the Bronx. With its high arches, stained glass windows and heavy wooden front doors, it would be easy to mistake the building’s facade for a chapel (as if the Jesuit university was lacking those). The interior’s high gabled ceiling is supported by a latticework of steel trusses and is also reminiscent of a church nave. The large translucent windows on either end bathe the interior in warm natural light for games on sunny weekend afternoons—again, not unlike sitting in a pew at a Saturday evening vigil mass. But even the world’s biggest organ couldn’t make a church sound as loud as Rose Hill gets when it’s full.

This is Rose Hill’s defining characteristic. Other arenas may have 20,000 fans rattling the rafters, but Rose Hill is uniquely suffocating. There isn’t an inch of wasted space in the small gym, which means the players and fans are right on top of each other. And when the crowd gets loud, the bare stone walls of the gym offer nowhere for that noise to go. 

“If you have any love for the history of the game, it’s a place that needs to be seen,” [Mike] Breen says. “If you like the movie Hoosiers and that little gym that they played in, it’s something like that. It’s like the Fenway Park of college basketball. It’s this place that was built so many years ago and still has some magic to it. I just think it’s one of the great places to see a game because it makes you think about the history of the game. Because that used to be the norm. Now it’s the exception, a building like that.”

“I love going to the gym,” says Breen, who still makes time in his busy announcing schedule to attend a couple of Fordham games each season. “Obviously I love the school, but it’s just a cool place to watch a game. There’s very few places where you can see high-level basketball in a building like that. They just don’t exist anymore.

“You’re in the last row, you feel like you can reach out and touch one of the players. If you’re in the last row you feel like a player running down the court’s sweat can fall on you,” he says. “Every seat, you’re right there. You’re right on top of the action. You can hear the officials talk to the coaches. You can hear the players talk to each other. That intimacy is what made it special and why it’s still special today.”

Rose Hill is one of those venues, though, where the game is almost secondary to the building itself. In the same way that fans come from all over to see Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and the Los Angeles Coliseum, the draw of seeing a game at Rose Hill is the ability to soak in the history of the game in an endangered species of a building. 

“It’s not going to drop your jaw because it’s cavernous and it’s got the most unique in-game entertainment or the best basketball you’ve ever seen,” [Mike] Watts says. “It’s a gym that almost serves as a diary of college basketball through every era and every iteration that exists of it. Choosing to come to a game at Rose Hill Gym is choosing to write your name in that ledger and be a guest of college basketball.”

Read the full story and watch the YouTube video.

INTERVIEWER: Pope Francis is known for his tenacity, his desire to keep going no matter what— one of the reasons that that he so beloved around the world. We saw him making his regular appearances and duties and tours around the world just a few weeks ago, days actually, before this latest stint in hospital began. What are your thoughts on this?

DAVID GIBSON: Well, yes, it’s not surprising. You know, he pushes himself. He’s a very stubborn 88-year-old Jesuit priest. He admits it himself. He said, “I have a bad character. I’m a terrible patient.” He doesn’t listen to his doctors. [H]e had bronchitis, really serious bronchitis, for a week before this. He couldn’t read his his own speeches. He insisted on going to an outdoor event. So, you know, look, he’s the Pope. It’s hard to tell him, “You’ve got to go to the hospital, you’ve got to slow down, you’ve got to take care of yourself.” He’s like an old Jesuit missionary. He wants to die in the saddle.

INTERVIEWER: What do you think is happening in his inner circle and in the uppermost echelons of the Vatican right now? 

GIBSON: They’re praying for the best and preparing for the worst. They want to be very clear—and they have in these last 24 hours—to quash any rumors of resignation or even of a conclave. The problem is that the shark starts circling as soon as the pope indicates that [he] might resign. It gets really, you know, gnarly in terms of internal Vatican politics. Listen, go look at the Oscar-nominated film Conclave. … It’s a little bit dramatized, but not totally wrong. When Pope Francis was first elected, he followed Pope Benedict, who was the first pope to resign in 600 years. Initially, Pope Francis said that should be normal. Popes one day will, as a matter of course, resign when they feel they can’t do the job anymore. But when he started saying that, all this speculation, all these machinations, started happening. So in recent years and in recent months, he said, “Look, I’m not going to resign. That’s not the way this is going to go, basically, I’ll die with my boots on, because they want it.” They [the inner circle] want to quash all of that politicking that goes on that’s unseemly in one aspect, and also it’s not the image that they want to project around the pope at this time. They just want people to be praying for the health of the pope. And hey, he may recover. 

“The court is careful to say that it’s limited to the circumstances in this case. Remember, this is a case that is principally about Chinese influence and control over the consumer, the information consumers get, and the data harvesting of U.S. consumers. So if you limit it to that, which is what the court tries to be careful on, it doesn’t reach as broadly. 

“The focus of the opinion is on the data harvesting of consumers’ information. Even though the plaintiffs argued that what Congress was really focused on was the content manipulation concern, … they also made the data harvesting argument, and this is what the court seized on.”

“[The court] said this is not a content-based regulation … and it is addressed to the concern that Congress had about the collection of consumer information. Now, that raises the kind of questions many of us ask about all the apps that collect information about consumers as a matter of course. It’s not just TikTok: it’s Instagram, it’s Facebook, it’s it’s X. So I guess this might give some of these companies some pause. I think the court tries to be careful about the limit, the scope of this, and focus on the threat from China and a foreign adversary.”

“This is addressed not just to ByteDance. This is also addressed to the app stores and to cloud servers. They too would be potentially in sights of a DOJ action, so Trump could sign an executive order that says, let’s not do anything. But, you know, I think if I’m a company that is impacted by this law, I would still be worried.”

“People have been reporting that Trump might sign an executive order that demands or requires DOJ [to]stand down, that they not enforce.

“People say that Trump may extend the deadline by 90 days. I don’t know if that is possible, though, because the statute requires that there be a deal on the table for that extension to be effective. There has been no deal on the table, even though people have talked about such a thing. So Trump would have to unilaterally extend the 90 days, without the requirements set out by the statute. So, you know, I’m not sure that is possible. What Trump could do is try to get Congress to repeal the law or write some different law. 

“In terms of unilateral action, I’m not sure that there is much that he could do other than an executive order.”

It takes one trip to learn it like the back of your hand because it isn’t much bigger.

Walk straight into the NCAA’s oldest on-campus basketball arena — opened Jan. 16, 1925 — and you’ll hit a wall, forcing you to turn (left or right) into a narrow hallway, past a parade of plaques of former Rams. The 3,200 seats hug the court. Everyone sits in coach, spitting distance from the sideline, beneath a cathedral ceiling and clerestory windows, allowing sunlight to touch the floor.

You can sit anywhere you like: 1971. 1947. 2023

“There is no bad seat because you’re right on top of everything,” said Jim Murphy, Class of ’83. “It brings you back in time. They don’t make ’em like this anymore.”

When Fordham beat Boston College, 46-16, in Rose Hill Gym’s first game — refereed by “The Fordham Flash,” Frankie Frisch, a future Baseball Hall of Famer, then the Giants’ second baseman — it was one of two regulation-sized basketball courts in the city.

Rose Hill Gym — which opened months before Lou Gehrig replaced Wally Pipp — has hosted games every season except 1943-44, when it served as barracks for the U.S. Army, housing hundreds of troops in training during World War II. It was an alternate football facility for the Seven Blocks of Granite and hosted practices for the Knicks, as well as home games for St. John’s, when Alumni Hall was under construction.

It is where Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played his final game for Power Memorial, winning the school’s third straight championship — its 78th win in 79 games — behind then-Lew Alcindor’s 32 points, 22 rebounds and eight blocks.

It was home to a freshman basketball team coached by Vince Lombardi and a JV squad featuring Denzel Washington and coach P.J. Carlesimo. It is where Vin Scully took his first cuts behind the mic and Mike Breen first yelled, “Bang!”

It is where the long-hidden potential resurfaced two seasons ago, when shirtless students painted their faces and opponents grew uneasy, as first-year coach Keith Urgo led Fordham to its most wins since 1971 and rechristened the gym “Rose Thrill.”

“We don’t want bigger or better. We love it here,” said Fordham sophomore guard Jahmere Tripp. “Playing in a gym with that much history, it’s kind of the same feeling to me as playing in a big arena. It’s a different vibe when you walk in the gym. There’s not too many like it in America.”

The happy surprise is that the incredible student warmth that I had at Loyola is also here at Fordham. I didn’t know if the bigger institution in blunt, aggressive New York would be different, but it’s not. These students are amazing and so kind to each other. And the challenges are the challenges of higher ed. We are navigating an increasingly hostile world where higher ed is a political football. And the growing affordability crisis is something we have to deal with, too.

One thing that Jesuit schools collectively have been doing and thinking about is, how do we better remind people what Jesuit education is? There’s a very important part of Jesuit tradition: When you go into a foreign land, you don’t just shout at people in Latin. And I think when we talk to Gen Z, it’s not enough to talk to them about cura personalis and magis, right? We have to translate into their language, so we’ve really been working hard to do that.

We have to make it clear that this is not a place of intolerance, that to be a Catholic institution does not mean we don’t want people of other faiths or people who are not of faith. And if you are a person of faith, no one is going to make you feel stupid or anti-intellectual or presume your politics. You get to be your full self here in ways that aren’t always true in an increasingly hostile secular world that is disrespectful of all religions too often.

In response to a question about the importance of athletics in higher ed and the changes with the transfer portal and NIL:

I think that in important efforts to regulate those handful of schools that make lots of money on athletics, the risk is that they kind of ruin it everywhere else. Schools like ours and most in this country spend money on athletics — we don’t profit off of them at all, not even close.

And we do it because we’re trying to enrich the lives of students. We look at our outcomes for student athletes. They graduate at higher levels, and they have incredible career outcomes. Employers love them because they’re the kind of kid who got up at six in the morning to go out in the cold and practice and learn teamwork and discipline. So we don’t want to lose that in the context of regulating Power Five football.

A region’s second-place franchise can emerge from shadows if an owner is willing to shell out cash, Fordham University professor Mark Conrad said, citing the NBA’s Steve Ballmer, who has remarkably made L.A. Clippers games fashionable events.

“The focus of New York baseball could be shifting now,” said Conrad, who teaches sports law at Fordham’s business school.

“The Mets were run like a minor league team for years under [former owner Fred]Wilpon. And now you have [Cohen] coming with a Steve Ballmer mentality: ‘This is my thing, and I will do what it takes.’ It’s a new incarnation of a George Steinbrenner.” 

[W]hen a reader told me to take a peek at the recent NCAA men’s water polo rankings, I saw a lot of sunny California schools I expected to see:

UCLA, USC, Stanford, Berkeley (aka the water polo “Big Four,” I’m told), the University of the Pacific (inland, but sounds nice), Pepperdine (idyllic), UC San Diego (sure) and UC Santa Barbara (of course)…you know, the sort of schools that sound like fabulous places to chuck a ball around a pool. 

And then I saw a school I didn’t expect to see at all:

Fordham.

As in Fordham University, in the Bronx–the New York City Jesuit school with distinguished academics, famous alumni (Denzel Washington, Vince Lombardi) and plentiful public transit access—but not exactly anyone’s idea of a beachside water polo Xanadu.

This past Sunday in Baltimore, I watched Fordham’s men’s water polo team swamp Johns Hopkins 28-12, improving their record to a perfect 24-0. It was a dominant display, sort of like watching the Globetrotters work over the Generals, but in water. (How’s that for some water polo analysis?)

Fordham has been lights out all season long. They’ve had big wins over proven East Coast rivals like Princeton (a ranked program and an NCAA tournament semi-finalist last year) and Harvard (no idea; apparently a school near MIT and Tufts.). Fordham even tore through a recent swing of California teams (including Pacific, UC-Santa Barbara, and San Jose State) that got the sport buzzing.

It’s to the point that the Rams shot to fifth in the country in the most recent NCAA RPI poll–and they’ve been as high as No. 2 in the weekly coaches poll. 

That’s not just milestone territory for Fordham water polo–it’s a historic performance for any Fordham team in any sport, ever.

“It’s absolutely thrilling,” says Fordham’s president, Tania Tetlow.

Read more here: Is This Undefeated Team the Best Story in College Sports?

Tania Tetlow grew up in a uniquely Catholic and Jesuit-influenced household, where dinner conversation centered around intellect, scripture, and justice. Throughout her career, her Jesuit formation and devotion to justice have guided her.

On this episode of The Catholic Leaders Podcast, hosts Kerry Robinson and Kim Smolik sit down with Tetlow, who grew up in New Orleans and spearheaded efforts to raise millions to rebuild and reimagine the city’s libraries after Hurricane Katrina as chair of the New Orleans Library board. She is a trailblazer in Catholic higher education, having served as the first female president of Loyola University New Orleans before becoming the first female president of Fordham in 2022.

How can hurricanes create complications ahead of an election?

A massive hurricane disrupts people’s lives in many important ways, including affecting people’s personal safety and where they can live. Ahead of an election, there are a lot of practical limitations about how an election can be executed – like if a person can still receive mail-in ballots at home or elsewhere, or if it is possible to still vote in person at their polling location if that building was destroyed or damaged.

Another issue is whether people who have just lived through a natural disaster and will likely be dealing with the aftermath for weeks to come are focused on politics right now. Some might sit out the election because they simply have more important things to worry about.

Beyond practical concerns, how else can a natural disaster influence an election?

The other side of the equation, which is what political scientists like myself are mostly focusing on, is whether people take the fact that a natural disaster happened into consideration when they vote. 

Two scholars, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, have argued that sometimes voters are not great at figuring out how to incorporate bad things that happened to them into a voting position. In some cases, it is entirely fair to hold an elected official responsible for bad outcomes that affect people’s lives. But at other moments, bad things can happen to us without that being the fault of an incumbent president or governor. And voters should ideally be able to balance out these different types of bad things – those it is fair to punish elected officials for, and those for which it isn’t fair to hold them responsible. 

How else do voters consider bad events when they vote?

Scholars like John Gasper and Andrew Reeves argue that voters mostly care whether elected officials respond appropriately to a disaster. So, if the president does a good job reacting, voters do not actually punish them at all in the next election. However, voters can punish elected officials if they feel like the response is not correct. 

The fact that Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005 was not the fault of then-President George W. Bush. But the perceived slowness of the government response is something a voter could have held him responsible for.

How do voters’ political affiliations affect where and how they lay the blame?

Colleagues and I have shown that how people interpret the combination of a disaster and the government response is likely colored by their own partisanship. 

We looked at both the effects of Superstorm Sandy on the 2012 presidential election and natural disasters’ impact on elections more broadly from 1972 through 2004. One core finding is that when presidents reject state officials’ disaster declaration requests, they lose votes in affected counties – but only if those counties were already more supportive of the opposite party. 

If there is a strong positive government response, the incumbent president or their party can actually gain votes or lose voters affected by a disaster. So, Republicans affected by the hurricanes could become more inclined to vote against Harris if they feel like they are not getting the help they need. But it could also help Harris if affected Democrats feel like they are getting enough aid.

The major takeaway is that if the government responds really effectively to a natural disaster or other emergency, there is not a huge electoral penalty – and there could even be a small reward. 

That is not irrelevant in a close election. If Republicans in affected areas in North Carolina feel the government response has been poor and it inspires them to turn out in higher numbers to punish Harris, that could matter. But if they feel like the response has been adequate, research suggests either no real effect on their support for Harris – or possibly even an increase in Harris voters.

Read the full interview here.

We’re seeing migrants from all parts of Africa coming to Senegal to make it to Europe. Why are they coming and why this specific route?

“Well, one reason is because of profound uncertainty about their futures. We have to understand that, for various reasons across this continent, people are just uncertain about what their futures will bring. They have economic uncertainty because you have in the rural areas … uncertain rainfall. You don’t know what the crops are going to yield year to year. And then you have growing populations in urban areas where there’s just increasing reliance on informal markets, and people don’t know if those informal markets and those informal jobs that they have in the informal sector are going to be there tomorrow. They have changing agreements, changing politics, which means that people just don’t know even if they have a livelihood today, will they have it tomorrow? Will they be able to provide for their families and communities tomorrow? And coming through here to Senegal is a relatively affordable route to take the boat to get to the Canary Islands.”

We’ve seen various agencies trying to explain to people that this is an extremely dangerous way to get to Europe to try to prevent people from going. People keep on taking this journey. Why?

“Yes, well, it’s a conundrum as to why so much money is thrown at these kinds of raising-awareness campaigns that the European Union will carry out. Why don’t these ever seem to work? Why don’t there ever seem to be any measurable results from these campaigns? And it’s because there’s actually a cultural script for migrating here that’s existed for hundreds of years, where young men will come of age through migration. In fact, that’s how they become men. That’s how they gain status and prestige in their communities. And that’s exactly what they’re seeking when they migrate abroad. They’re seeking voyage. They’re seeking to discover new places. They’re seeking to go to places like London, Paris, New York, places that, you know, I would also like to go to, but we also migrate for all these various reasons. And thus, they want to confront risk. Confronting risk during their journeys makes it even more prestigious, makes it show that they can overcome that risk. And these people, in many places across West Africa, come from communities where not migrating is not living.”

There have been a lot of efforts from Europeans to fund development projects here on the continent to try to make people stay. In fact, where we stand in Senegal, it’s one of the fastest growing economies in the world. So why is it that people are leaving despite there being some level of economic opportunity right here at home?

“I mean, that’s a great question. I think people ask that a lot, and the real reason is because people aren’t seeing the benefits. These people who are leaving are simply not seeing the benefits of this economic growth. There is significant economic growth, but unfortunately, the people who end up seeing that are often not from not from these countries, for example. The agreements that have been made with previous governments aren’t always the most advantageous, and they’re just not trickling down to people … who are seeking to migrate now. Second of all, people know that if they migrate, the kinds of jobs that they can get in Europe—which, by the way, needs their labor in many ways—they know that they can remit much more money than these aid packages will ever give. I mean, the amount of money they remit, as you know, just makes what European and American aid [provides]seem so much smaller. And so people much prefer to migrate as opposed to experience the kind of social death they might experience here, even risking actual death. They don’t want to suffer that kind of social death of failing nearby their families and community.”