The Rev. Richard J. Dillon, professor emeritus of theology, was elected vice president of the CBA during the group’s annual meeting in June of 2011. Following his term as vice president, Father Dillon will assume his role as president during the 75th International Meeting of the CBA, which will be held July 28 through 31 at the University of Notre Dame.

Father Dillon retired in 2008 after 30 years at Fordham, seven of which he was chair of the theology department. In addition to his 46-year membership in the CBA, Father Dillon served for four years as editor of The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, the official journal of the CBA.

The CBA was established in 1936 by Bishop Edwin O’Hara, chair of the Episcopal Committee on the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, to promote biblical study and improved biblical translation. The group prompted a revision of the Challoner-Rheims translation of the New Testament in 1941, and in 1970 published new translations of both the Old and New Testaments under the title “The New American Bible.”

Over the last seven decades, the CBA has encouraged scholarly study of the Bible and has grown from its original 50 members in 1936 to more than 1,500 worldwide.

Father Richard Dillon (third from left) will become president of
the Catholic Biblical Association in July.
Photo courtesy of Catholic New York

Bills, a student at Columbia University’s MPA program in development practice, served in the Peace Corps as an environment/business volunteer in Fiji from May 2008 to June 2010.

Administered by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation for the U.S. Department of State, the Pickering Fellowships develop a source of well-prepared men and women from academic disciplines who fulfill the skill needs of the United States Department of State and who are dedicated to representing America’s interests abroad.

The Fellowship will provide support for Bills’ graduate work at Columbia University in preparation for her entry into the U.S. Foreign Service. The 14th class of graduate fellows receive financial support towards a two-year, full-time master’s degree program in a related field such as public policy, international affairs, public administration, or other academic fields such as business, economics, political science, sociology or foreign languages.

Fellows in both graduate and undergraduate programs participate in one domestic and one overseas internship. They commit to three years of service as a foreign service officer for the U.S. Department of State, contingent on their passing the Foreign Service examinations. The Foreign Service, a corps of working professionals who support the President of the United States and the Secretary of the United States Department of State in pursuit of the goals and objectives of American foreign policy, are “front-line” personnel who can be sent anywhere in the world, at any time, in service to the diplomatic needs of the United States.

The Thomas R. Pickering Foreign Affairs Fellowship Program is named in honor of one of the most distinguished and capable American diplomats of the latter half of the 20th century. Mr. Pickering held the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest rank in the U.S. Foreign Service. He served as Ambassador to Nigeria, El Salvador, Israel, India, and the Russian Federation, finishing his career as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

Known as Mr. Everything, Tad Kornegay, CBA ’05, is a defensive specialist for the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the Canadian Football League. Kornegay, who played defensive back at Fordham, appeared in the CFL All-Star Game last season and was named one of the 50 best players in the league, as his Roughriders captured the Western Division en route to a trip to the Grey Cup, the Super Bowl of the CFL. “Any way I can help my teammates out and the team, I’m going to do it,” said Korengay, seen here trying to block a kick in a game against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. “Wherever they put me, I want to be at my best.”

Read more about Kornegay’s success in the CFL.

These, said John P. Lionato (FCRH, ’85), are some of the traits that Fordham College of Business Administration (CBA) students need to learn to be successful in business.

Lionato, Global Leader of Operational Excellence at San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace Hosting, Inc., spoke to undergraduate students at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus on Wednesday, Sept. 15. His hour-long lecture and Q&A session, “Being A Leader,” was one of six in Access Your Future, a week of programming for CBA students featuring industry leaders talking about life outside of academia.

To give a fuller sense of what it means to be an effective leader, Lionato went back to his own career, citing eight leaders who he’s been fortunate enough to work with. Just as they mentored him, students should seek out mentors too, and when the time comes, they should take others under their wing. One of the lessons he learned was to not fear occasional setbacks.

“More than anything else, it isn’t really whether the situation fails. It’s whether you did the best you could in the situation,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you work so hard, and it didn’t do any good; it means that you worked smart and good, and made the best decisions you could, but the thing was just against you.”

He also told students to not be afraid to try different jobs if those jobs give them a better understanding of the company as a whole, but not to settle on one that doesn’t speak to their strengths. When they learn to recognize this in others, they will earn the loyalty of their fellow workers.

“We call people at Rackspace, ‘Rackers.’ They will kill for the company. Time has no meaning,” he said. “Why? It is all wrapped in who you are. We look at people who want to come to work at Rackspace, and the first thing question is, do they fit culturally? We’ll figure out what job they can do next.”

—Patrick Verel

Ascend, the organization for accounting and finance professionals of Asian and Pacific Islander descent, and KPMG, a audit, tax and advisory firm picked the team, which also included students from Drexel University, Queens College and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, during its third annual conference in New York City.

Their team beat five others in a competition that pitted 30 students from 16 colleges and universities from around the country. They were tasked with analyzing technical accounting issues and addressing managerial, corporate, operating and sustainability concerns and developing an implementation strategy for a new retail store concept in China.

The teams presented their analysis and recommendations in a 20-minute presentation to the panel of judges. As part of their win, each student received a $500 prize.

Sickles, who earned an MBA from Northwestern University after graduating from Fordham with a degree in marketing and management, will speak at 9:30 a.m. in the McGinley Center Ballroom.

In his current position, he is responsible for developing Google’s global relationships with a select group of consumer product’s companies. Previously, he spent three years as head of healthcare at Google, focused on providing solutions for healthcare and pharmaceutical companies, and a year in sales management with Google Audio.

After Sickles’ talk, Frank Werner, Ph.D., associate professor of finance and economics will review the students’ summer reading assignment, The Google Story (Delacorte Press, 2005). The students then will break into groups to discuss potential business proposals.

—Patrick Verel

The online component of the magazine, which went live on Aug. 17, also ranks Fordham University at No. 56 among the 262 most prestigious national—or “top-tier”—universities.

“That the strength of Fordham’s undergraduate business program is being recognized comes as no surprise to me,” said Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of CBA and business faculty. “Our dedicated and hardworking students, faculty and alumni form an extended entrepreneurial community, and have New York City—the money capital of the world—for their laboratory. Wherever our graduates go, they are equipped to be leaders in their fields.”

The marketing area was also ranked fourth in a list of undergraduate specialties released by Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine in May. In addition, the college was ranked eighth in ethics; ninth in business law; 19th in finance; and 23rd in accounting.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek surveyed more than 85,000 students at more than 100 top business schools and asked them to rate their programs’ performance in a dozen academic disciplines ranging from accounting and ethics to marketing and sustainability. The list ranked specialty areas from the 50 top undergraduate business programs.

The U.S. News rankings come two weeks after Fordham boosted its academic and quality-of-life ratings in the 2011 version of The Princeton Review’s influential college guide: The Best 373 Colleges: 2011 Edition.

Fordham also earned the distinction of being one of eight schools in the top tier that has no more than 1 percent of its classes larger than 50 students. In fact, 50 percent of the University’s classes had 20 students or fewer.

The magazine defines top-tier national universities as those that offer a wide range of undergraduate majors as well as master’s and doctoral degrees, often with an emphasis on research. The top category is based on guidelines from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and includes 164 public and 98 private institutions.

U.S. News uses a proprietary methodology that ranks more than 1,400 accredited four-year schools based on a set of 16 indicators of academic quality. Among the key measures of quality the magazine factors are peer assessments, graduation and retention rates, faculty resources and student selectivity.

In addition to taking classes at the Rose Hill campus, Mattioli, the grandson of Lake Pond, Pa.-based Pocono Raceway founders Joseph and Rose Mattioli, is pursuing a career in racing with NASCAR. He’s currently in the midst of the 20-race Automobile Racing Club of America Series—which is to NASCAR’s Sprint Cup Series what AA baseball is to the major league baseball—with Jack Roush’s Roush Racing team.

Although stock car racing in the Poconos might seem like a world away from the urban setting of the Bronx, Mattioli said the connection between his classes and the track are closer than one might think.

“The thing about racing is that it’s not as much of a meritocracy as other sports like football or baseball. You need to be just as marketable as you have to be talented in order to be successful,” he said.

“You look at guys like Dale Earnhardt Jr. He hasn’t won every race in the series but he’s still the highest paid driver because he can market the most products and sell the most cans of soda. That’s something that’s very important to racing, because as much as I don’t like to lean on this, the car has so much to do with it. If you have a car that’s underfunded and a team that doesn’t have the money to buy tires and get the good engineers, it’s going to show on the racetrack. So having a good marketing background helps my performance on the racetrack.”

Mattioli is acutely aware of the importance of well-maintained equipment. At a recent race at his grandparents’ track, a single bolt came loose, causing his car to lose the entire drive shaft.

“One of the most common things you’ll here from anyone in the business is “That’s racing,’” he said. “Any little thing, like, you know, a plastic fork could be on the track, and I could split a tire. For me, it was one bolt that came out and cost us our run.”

Thankfully, Mattioli said this was an aberration in an otherwise successful season of racing, which for him began in February in Daytona. It’s a season that he’s been practicing for at Rose Hill, on a $2,000 racing simulator that he hooks up to the television in his dorm room. That might seem like a lot of money for a video game, but it pails in comparison to the $10,000 he said it would take to book a live practice on a track.

“With the computer technology, they can really get a trace a track perfectly as far as how it feels, every bump, nook and cranny,” he said. “If you have a tar strip where the track is cracked, they’ll put it in there, and you can feel it. Every inch is there.”

After all, Mattioli said, every little inch matters when you’re approaching speeds of 200 mph.

“You can’t just look right in front of your car and assume you can make the right turn. You have to have visuals, muscle memory, and other things like that, so that when you’re on two wide of a turn going 190, you know where you’re at and where you’re going to be. For a race in Michigan, for example, I have 18 eye points all around the track, and I gain them from the video game. They put every sign, every light and every mark on the wall.”

If everything goes according to plan, in two years Mattioli will join 2008 Daytona 500 winner Ryan Newman as the only other full-time driver in the Sprint Cup Series with a bachelor’s degree. This makes him an oddity in the racing community, but having graduated from Scranton Preparatory School, Mattioli said he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to attend a Jesuit university like Fordham. Being in New York puts him closer to potential sponsors even as the sports’ relatively low profile in the tri-state area relieves any pressure he might experience elsewhere.

“The cool thing about New York City was that I was able to come here and not be a race car driver. I could just be a college kid. The sport is popular in the city, but it’s not the Yankees; it’s not football,” he said. “It’s a nice little place where racecar drivers can hide. If I were to go to high school in North Carolina or somewhere down South, it would be kind of overwhelming.”

Aside from his two roommates, Mattioli has not shared his occupation with many people. His story, he insists, is just one of many interesting ones that students at Rose Hill have to share.

“My story is pretty interesting, but I think they all have very interesting backgrounds and lives,” he said. “My friend Ryan is one of these crazy guys; he just spent the summer hiking up Mount Sinai and traveling the Jordan and Israel. There’s a whole bunch of cool people who I got to meet just by coming to Fordham.”

Mattioli’s unofficial role as an ambassador for racing also helps his family’s track, which is a 90-minute drive away. That’s where he grew up around a culture of racing, and he’s confidant that New Yorkers who have not been exposed to it as children will learn to appreciate it.

“We just had our race in June, and I had about 20 people who’d never been to a race before come,” he said. “To see their eyes light up when the cars go by, when they actually hear the real sound, they feel the air and the ground, vibrating from the engines pulsating, it’s just such an experience. I love to bring anyone I can.”

Hosted by

Fordham University Graduate School of Business Administration
and Sander Flaum, Chair of the Fordham Leadership Forum

Featuring
Paul Carlucci, CBA ’69
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, News America Marketing; Publisher, The New York Post

“Business Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow…
How to Be Successful in Corporate America”

Monday, 12 April 2010 | 6 p.m.
McNally Amphitheatre | Fordham Law School
Fordham University | Lincoln Center Campus
Reception in the Platt Atrium immediately follows the lecture.

RSVP by Monday, 5 April 2010, to the Office of Special Events at:
specialevnts@fordham.edu or (212) 636-6575.

The students will travel to Kenya later this month to help the women establish their businesses by designing marketing plans and other necessary aspects of a startup.

It is the culmination of more than three years of work by students and Katherine Combellick, Ph.D., assistant professor and director of international service learning (ISL).

“Banks in Kenya seem to have a blind spot when lending to the poor, so we studied microfinance credit and designed the two loans. I gave them out over Christmas break, and now our team of eight students will visit the recipients, along with our Fair Trade business partners in Kenya, during spring break,” Combellick said.

Microfinance is an economic model by which loans of a few hundred dollars and other monetary services are provided to impoverished people who have virtually no collateral.

While in Kenya, students will assist with the completion of evaluation forms for Fair Trade certification, write annual reports and show the new entrepreneurs how to put together a website for their business. They also will visit a school in Nyabigena, a village in the western part of the country, which was begun as a consequence of the first Fordham trip to Kenya more than three years ago.

Along with Combellick, six students traveled to Kenya in 2006 and toured Fair Trade businesses on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital city, and Nyabigena. They set out to help women in these villages start new enterprises through microfinance.

The group met with women who were interested in starting a sewing collective, and others who were willing to start a small bead-making enterprise. While visiting a soap-stone collective in Nyabigena run mostly by men, the group quickly realized how difficult it is for women to start even the smallest business in Kenya, where they are not allowed to inherit land or money.

So the students devised another way to help. They bought thousands of dollars of soapstone goods, including artfully prepared handmade crucifixes and chess sets, which they sell at Fordham and continue to reorder.

“With the money we paid to purchase our initial soapstone, the carvers were able to create a school for their children,” Combellick said. “The profits from the soapstone collective itself sometimes are given to the school to pay teachers’ salaries, so I feel we have sparked a beneficial business and educational endeavor.

“I’m very proud of what the students have accomplished. They’ve worked really hard and will make CBA proud with the work they do in Kenya,” Combellick added.

At its Feb. 11 meeting, the Board approved the design and engineering phase for the renovation of Hughes Hall, a 50,000-square-foot residence hall across from Edwards Parade.

The renovation will provide the College of Business Administration with the central, integrated facility it has long needed, while freeing up 10,800 square feet of academic space occupied by CBA throughout the Rose Hill campus.

The Board has approved $10 million toward the total $30 million cost of the project.  The remaining $20 million will be raised through Excelsior | Ever Upward | The Campaign for Fordham, the University’s $500 million capital campaign that was launched publicly last year.

“The trustees are confident we can raise the funds necessary to give Fordham facilities for a first-rate business education,”  said Al Checcio, vice president for development and university relations. “We know the alumni support is out there, and that we can deliver a centralized, modern facility for CBA.”

The campaign involves a broad cross-section of the Fordham community: deans, staff members, alumni, and friends of Fordham.  The current campaign total is $313.3 million, which includes $100.9 million from current and former members of the Board of Trustees.

The campaign has already resulted in another major construction project at the Rose Hill campus.  Thanks to the generosity of alumni, the University is set to open Campbell, Salice and Conley residence halls this fall, which will more than offset the residential space that will be lost through the renovation of Hughes Hall.

Together, the projects will produce a net gain in residential and academic space that supports the goals of educational excellence and national preeminence expressed in the campaign.

The renovation will transform the College of Business Administration by bringing all its students and faculty together under one roof, in a state-of-the-art facility equipped with the latest learning technologies and ample space for special events.

“I’m very pleased that the Board of Trustees recognizes the importance of new facilities for CBA. The renovation of Hughes Hall will provide a much-needed academic center for us at the heart of the Rose Hill campus,” said Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., dean of the College of Business Administration and dean of business administration faculty. “To date, we have made enormous progress: CBA has a tightly focused strategic plan and an outstanding faculty and student body. The new academic space gives CBA the physical means to achieve its goals.”

The College is headquartered in Faber Hall, but many of its classrooms and faculty offices are dispersed throughout the Rose Hill campus.  The Hughes Hall renovation will create the centralized, efficient learning environment that business schools across the country have been creating for more than a decade.

Since 1995, more than 100 business schools have renovated their buildings or constructed new ones, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.  Eighteen projects are in progress, including 11 that are expected to be done this year, according to AACSB.

The renovation of Hughes Hall will nearly quadruple the College’s physical space.  It will contain a computer lab, four board/meeting rooms, six study rooms, a student lounge encircled by faculty offices, a 250-seat auditorium, and nine classrooms of more than 40 seats apiece.

It will have space for a career center and specialized learning laboratories in global business, entrepreneurship and other subjects.  A trading floor will be located on the first floor of Hughes Hall, just inside its front entrance.