The cafe will open in September at the Lincoln Center campus in 140 West, in the garden-level space currently occupied by Argo Tea.

Wanted: A Student CEO

Saxbys, which bills itself as “an education company disguised as a coffee company,” will recruit students to run the cafe, including a “Student CEO” who will be responsible for all operations for a six-month term. In exchange for salary and course credit, the CEO will oversee 15 team leads and roughly 34 team members.

The first Student CEO will be chosen from the Gabelli School of Business, while successive ones will be drawn from throughout Fordham’s student body. The other positions, including team leads, will be open to all Fordham students from the start.

When the cafe opens, Fordham will join roughly 30 other colleges, primarily in the Northeast, that operate cafes in partnership with Saxbys. Fordham will be the company’s first New York City partner.

“When people support a Saxbys, they’re not just getting a great product and a great hospitality environment. They’re supporting the next generation of leaders and entrepreneurs,” said CEO Nick Bayer.

“These are really hard jobs with high expectations where young people are taking what they learned in the classroom, they’re getting a learning experience, and they’re coupling those two things together to go off and be great leaders.”

Saxbys arrival marks the second student-run coffee shop at Fordham, joining Rodrigues, located at the Rose Hill campus. 

Argo Employees to Stay at LC 

Since Saxbys is run exclusively by students, the current Argo employees will remain valued members of the Ram Hospitality team at Lincoln Center.

Saxbys Staples: Cold Brew and Grilled Cheese

The cafe will feature an expansive menu anchored by cold-brew coffee, grilled cheese sandwiches, and smoothies. Bayer said the expanded offerings will extend the appeal of the space beyond mornings when coffee and tea are in higher demand.

“We really want to continue to energize that space and make it one that people are excited to visit morning, noon, and night,” said Bayer. 

New Kind of Experiential Learning

Vincent DeCola, S.J., assistant dean at the Gabelli School, said the Saxbys partnership will dramatically expand opportunities for experiential learning–a priority for the business college. 

“They’ll be learning in real-time about supply chains, maintaining inventory, planning for the pricing, the placement of things, and promotions,” he said.

“It’s a terrific experience, especially in areas like marketing, entrepreneurship, and accounting.”

Because the Student CEO role will be a full-time position, DeCola said he expects those students’ course load to be adjusted accordingly. Credits will be applied from their time managing the cafe, and they’ll also be given the opportunity to take a night class.

He said he was encouraged by the fact that the arrangement has been successful at so many other colleges, including St. Joseph’s University, a Jesuit school in Philadelphia. He noted that one of the supports that Saxbys offers to student CEOs is access to a group of former Student CEOs who they can turn to for advice.

“We anticipate that we can do this in a way that’s meaningful, and we’ll find things to improve each semester as we move forward,” Father DeCola said.

The Fordham community is invited to a tasting event at 1 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 26, in the Garden Lounge, on the ground floor of 140 W. 62nd St.

But if you ask Gabelli student Joseph Buccheri to go back and rethink his choice to study philosophy alongside finance, he insists, “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

He isn’t alone in making such a claim. At Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business—a place where talk of marketable skills and return-on-investment form the vernacular—there is little doubt about the value of the liberal arts. Here, courses such as philosophy, history, and theology form a central part of the business curriculum.

Buccheri, a junior at Gabelli, said he has found great value in the unlikely combination of finance and philosophy. There are the traditional upshots of studying philosophy, he said—namely, a refined writing style, critical thinking skills, an exposure to theories outside of one’s own discipline. But he was surprised to find that philosophy’s logic-based thinking style is also directly helpful for learning how to pitch a financial argument.

“Finance is less a science than it is an art,” Buccheri said. “You have to consider many different aspects when you’re building a financial model—for instance, tax rate, growth rate, discount rate, the industry in general, comparable companies, and so on—and then build an argument as to why [your model]is appropriate.”

“Businesses really need to consider how their decisions reflect who they are as a company in terms of their ethics,” he said. “People do take note of companies’ ethical decisions, which is something that could ultimately be reflected in their sales.”

Granted, there is indeed a practical upshot of centering a business curriculum on a liberal arts core, said Donna Rapaccioli, Ph.D., the dean of Fordham’s Schools of Business.

“Many technical skills necessary to get a job today will be obsolete in a few years,” said Rapaccioli. “Successful employees—and good leaders—need the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing world. They also need an ethical grounding and a nuanced worldview [to develop]one of the most important attributes any business person can possess—integrity.”

A liberal arts education is useful not just for cultivating a different kind of skillset, however, she said. She believes that the depth it adds to a student’s overall education is inherently valuable—both for the student’s personal growth and for the sake of the business environments they are entering.

“There are many good business schools and many outstanding business students,” she said. “What students get here that they may not get elsewhere is a sense of purpose… a strong idea of his or her place in the world.”

Global Business at Lincoln Center

This belief has played out in the Gabelli School’s brand new global business program based at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus. Students take the same core courses that all Fordham students take (courses in literature, history, philosophical ethics, and fine arts, among others). Each student must then take seven additional liberal arts courses to complement his or her chosen concentration, which ultimately amounts to a minor in a liberal arts discipline.

The idea, said Vin DeCola, S.J., assistant dean for Gabelli School of Business at Lincoln Center, is that students understand not just the what of their business education, but the what for.

“Courses in anthropology and psychology might help a marketing student to understand consumer behavior and the global marketplace,” Father DeCola said. “Similarly, the management degree with a focus on healthcare would invite taking science classes for a more direct grounding in the science behind the health industry.”

In terms of a traditional business curriculum, some of the program’s requirements—such as calculus or macroeconomics—are not so unconventional. What makes the Gabelli School unique, Father DeCola said, is the idea that even the humanities have an important role to play in business instruction.

“Theology, for instance, helps in understanding the belief structures that are embodied in many different places in the world,” he said. “If you’re doing business on a global level it’s important to know faith traditions behind the countries you’ll be interacting with.

“The idea here is that because this is a global business program, a broad knowledge of the world is important in order to read the signs of the times and understand the trends going forward.”

“Morally speaking, it is quite simply Fordham’s responsibility to educate the whole person,” Rapaccioli said. “We ask our students to be a part of Fordham’s culture, which stresses classical liberal education, because we want our graduates to be compassionate and ethical global leaders, not just highly skilled accountants, financiers, or marketers.

“We cannot simply pay lip service here to ethics and the greater good. We have to live it. Hundreds of years of history demand that of us. That tradition is worth something.”