For one thing, make sure that school is a place where they want to be.

That’s one takeaway from a new Fordham study of Bronx public school leaders trying to advance equity in their schools and ensure they’re welcoming and supportive for every student.

For these schools, that meant overcoming the effects of poverty, exclusion, and bias, or whatever else might be keeping students away. Schools in the study “thought about this really holistically” and reduced absenteeism as a result, said the study’s author, Elizabeth Stosich, Ed.D., associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and associate chair of the Division of Educational Leadership, Administration, and Policy.

Poverty and COVID Hurt Attendance

Her study was published in November in Frontiers in Education. From 2021 to 2022, she examined the efforts of four district leaders and eight school leaders in one of the 12 community school districts in the Bronx. It’s a district where absenteeism is an especially tough problem because of high rates of poverty and the death rate—one of the city’s highest—during the coronavirus pandemic, she said.

The schools she studied were trying to advance equity through continuous improvement, a management approach from the corporate and health care spheres that more and more schools are adopting. Among other things, it emphasizes a bottom-up approach to understanding an organization’s problems and making changes.

Getting Creative: Laundry, Fun Fridays, and Campfires

What did that look like in the schools? One of them set up a laundry because some families lacked access to one, hindering their kids’ attendance. Teachers identified the student groups in each school who felt the most ignored—in one case, English learners—and found ways to engage them. One school launched “Fun Fridays” full of meetings by clubs that reflected students’ interests—strategically scheduled on a day when students tend to be absent.

Teachers cooked with students or began art projects; one of them set up a faux campfire around which students could tell stories. “They really got creative, and it spurred new ideas,” she said.

Asking Students What They Truly Need = Success

Crucially, all of these initiatives came from talking to students themselves, Stosich said.

“By going to students and asking what they truly need, and then redesigning school in that image, that is how they engage in more really transformative work to support student success,” she said.

Also important was creating inclusive, supportive school environments for students from historically marginalized racial and ethnic backgrounds, she said: “They thought about, yes, getting students into school, but then creating the experiences that would pull them in and keep them through both a more engaging and culturally responsive curriculum and instruction.”

While absenteeism remained a stubborn challenge, the districts’ schools showed a lot of improvement compared with similar districts in the area, she said.

‘Start Small to Learn Fast’

Stosich noted the importance of a long-term focus on equity, in addition to short-term efforts. Continuous improvement has a “start small to learn fast” approach, involving a series of short-term inquiry cycles combined with empathy interviews and data gathering to get at the roots of an issue and find the best solutions, she said.

“Oftentimes in education and other fields, we start with a solution,” she said. “We’ll adopt some practice across the whole district or across the whole school before we even know if this would lead to improvements. It can lead to a lot of burnout and ‘initiative fatigue’ among educators who are not convinced that the next new thing is going to be any better than the last new thing.”

The reasons for absenteeism evolve and change, and vary from one school to another, she said, “so spending time to really understand the problem is essential.”

Kramer has written widely about the importance of sound for appreciating history, art, literature, and current events. Why this approach? Because thinkers dating from Aristotle have treated sight as the most important of the five senses, leading sound to be a little, well, overlooked.

“When you begin to concentrate on sound, all kinds of things come up that traditionally would never have come up,” he said.

In his most recent book, Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being, he continues his focus on the humanistic side of sound studies, a field that emerged in recent decades because of advances in sound technology. The overall message is that sound is “the medium by which we measure the sense of being alive,” he said.

The book comprises 66 short essays about “all of the remarkable ways in which sound has affected human lives … and also affected the way in which people feel about being alive,” he said. His hope, he said, is “for people to start listening to the world as hard as they look at it.”

Some encapsulated essays from Experiencing Sound:

The Wind on Mars

In 2018, a NASA Mars lander detected something no earthling had ever heard: the Martian wind. It conveyed that Mars was a world in a way the quiet, windless moon is not. “The sense of a world cannot be established only by what we can see, as we can see the lunar landscape,” Kramer writes. “A planet can be seen, pure and simple. But a world can be seen only if it can be heard.”

The Talking Dead

A voice recording conveys life and presence in a way that the visual (i.e., someone’s portrait) does not, as exemplified in 1890, when the voice of the deceased poet Robert Browning was played at an event commemorating him, creating the air of an “extraordinary séance,” one journalist noted. His grieving sister viewed it as a kind of sacrilege, Kramer writes—for her, “it was too alive for comfort.”

Annals of Slavery

In her 1861 memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs describes hiding in an attic’s crawlspace for seven years to avoid being sexually abused by her enslaver. For Jacobs, the street sounds she could hear from the crawlspace were a thread that linked her to life, Kramer writes—until she was able to escape to the North, “what freedom she had was carried on the sound of voices in the street.”

The Contralto Mystique

The author William Styron, in his 1990 memoir Darkness Visible, is dissuaded from attempting suicide when he hears a soaring contralto singer in a movie. It stirred family memories and had a power that was “literally maternal,” Kramer writes, because it reminded Styron of the voice of his late mother singing the same music.

Prisons of Silence

The human need for sound was apparent to Charles Dickens, who wrote “the dull repose and quiet that prevails, is awful” after visiting America’s first penitentiary, Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where all prisoners were held in solitary confinement in enforced silence. And in a 20th-century Russian gulag, the enforced silence was described as physically stifling by prisoner Eugenia Ginzburg: “I would have given anything to have heard just one sound.”

Minding the Senses

“[K]nowledge comes as much through the ear as through the eye,” Kramer writes. Henry David Thoreau knew this, apparently, with his descriptions of murmuring wind, creaking footsteps in the snow, vibrations in the ear, and the jingling of ice on trees. Even so, today someone returning from a walk will be asked “What did you see?” rather than “What did you hear?” “This,” writes Kramer, “needs to change.”

Quantum computers can handle a vastly greater number of computations at once in a fraction of the time. They are elaborate and expensive, and typically only big corporations have them.

But the team of computer science graduate students came up with an algorithm for distributing large quantum computations across multiple smaller machines—quantum computers as well as traditional computers—that each handle a piece of the problem. Collectively, they achieve the same result as the bigger computer while using a bare fraction of the resources.

The team authored two academic papers last year describing the algorithm, which could expand public access to quantum computing beyond the corporations that can afford the expensive hardware that’s required for quantum machines.

Quantum Entrepreneurs

The NSF program provides the students with entrepreneurship training as well as interviews with potential customers for their invention. And the students are finding strong interest in the potentially game-changing technology. “There is a promising future” in business applications for quantum computing, said doctoral student Shuwen Kan, the lead researcher. “People are trying to commercialize it in all aspects, in all industries.”

She and her fellow students have talked to people who work in finance, technology, and the biomedical field, as well as someone from one of the ride-sharing companies, about how they might use the new algorithm.

One lesson she’s learned from the NSF training, Kan said, is to “try to avoid being technical” when talking to potential customers. That’s not always easy.

How Do Quantum Computers Work?

Quantum computers are an entirely new kind of computer: Unlike the ones we use every day, which read data in tiny streams of bits and bytes, they’re set up to harness the quantum states of electrons, which can exist in multiple places simultaneously. That means quantum computers can handle far more computing tasks at the same time, compared with current computers, and potentially save energy as well.

Quantum computers hold “immense” potential for addressing society’s problems—for instance, providing much more precise models of climate change by harnessing an exponentially greater amount of data, said Ying Mao, Ph.D., the computer science professor who mentored the students’ research. They could also slash the amount of energy needed for the burgeoning growth of data centers and the power-hungry process of artificial intelligence, he said.

But for now, the larger-scale quantum computers that could bring such benefits are in their infancy. They are not only costly but also require lots of power to correct errors and cool the components to extreme temperatures, Mao said. The students’ discovery would allow for quantum computing that requires far less energy.

Democratizing Quantum Computing

The students published an earlier version of their algorithm in May, and a more advanced version they announced in December is undergoing peer review. When implemented, it would allow a large quantum computing problem to be run from a computer “anywhere in the world,” as long as it’s connected to other machines online, Kan said. “I think it will help to democratize the distribution of [quantum] computing,” she said.

‘A ChatGPT Moment’

Kan and four fellow students—Zefan Du, Yanni Li, Yin Su, and Luisa Rosa—are taking part in the NSF program, calling their team Ascend Quantum. They eventually plan to offer the basic algorithm for free online, and they’re working with the Fordham Foundry to develop a business that will adapt the algorithm to particular companies’ needs.

Kan likened the current state of quantum computing to that of artificial intelligence before ChatGPT showed people how it could affect everyday life.

“People in the quantum community believe there will be a ‘ChatGPT moment’ for quantum,” she said.

While pursuing her doctoral studies, Fordham history professor Stephanie Huezo, Ph.D., was intrigued to learn about those who were “teaching people to read and write during a war, when they were fleeing military operations,” she said. Thus began her research that led to her current book project on how popular education has helped people organize and effect change—in both El Salvador and the United States.

Revolutionary Learners

Huezo is on leave this semester writing the book, tentatively titled Revolutionary Learners: Grassroots Organizing and Political Consciousness in Salvadoran Communities (1980-2020). Her work is supported by a prestigious Career Enhancement Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the Institute for Citizens & Scholars, which focuses on strengthening democracy and civil discourse.

The Salvadoran Civil War killed more than 75,000 people over a 12-year period. The war ended in 1992 with UN-mediated peace accords between the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the Salvadoran government, which gave neither side a conclusive victory.

It was soon after the outbreak of the civil war—when the government had shut down hundreds of schools—that communities in FMLN-controlled areas turned to popular education, a grassroots approach to spreading literacy and political awareness, Huezo said. Professional teachers, professors, union organizers, and others trained the popular educators, hundreds of whom taught the poor and oppressed in rural communities and FMLN guerilla camps.

Many of those who were teaching the popular teachers had no more than a sixth-grade education. They often worked in abandoned buildings or under mango trees, sometimes forced to share paper and pencils—if any were even available, as Huezo described in an article last year.

‘Trying to Build a New Society’

Salvadoran communities and the FMLN were looking beyond mere survival. During her interviews in El Salvador, Huezo spoke with a woman who became an educator after being inspired by the FMLN saying they were “trying to build a new society” through education, in preparation for eventually taking power.

Teachers used the generative method of a Brazilian educator named Paulo Freire, leveraging students’ existing knowledge to build literacy while also helping them understand their country’s history and develop critical thinking.

“That’s really what popular education does—it not only teaches people how to read and write by using simple words that fit into one’s daily life, but also understand the root of a situation in order to then work to change it,” Huezo said.

Long-Term Impacts of Popular Education

Popular education strengthened young people’s commitment to resisting the repressive Salvadoran government and gave people the education they needed for organizing food distribution and other local efforts, according to Huezo. The education had longer-term impacts as well, as communities that organized during the war also supported the country’s first-in-the-world ban on metals mining, passed in 2017 (but recently repealed).

“There’s more awareness of the power of organizing because of what happened” during the civil war, Huezo said.

Popular educators from Central America have helped seed organizing efforts in U.S. immigrant communities as well. In her book, Huezo will describe how these communities’ activism helped bring about Temporary Protected Status, a federal government designation that spares immigrants from deportation for humanitarian reasons. (The Biden administration gave the program an 18-month extension in early January.)

Huezo described popular education as empowering not only for students but for their teachers—and for anyone trying to effect change. By sharing their knowledge, teachers lose the attitude of “I’m no one” and come to appreciate what they have to offer, even if they didn’t get far in school.

The larger lesson, she said, is that “even though we might feel like we don’t have a lot to give, we do.”

On Jan. 4, Rico Lucenti became one of the few student vets to receive the President’s Volunteer Service Award, administered by AmeriCorps and presented at the Student Veterans of America (SVA) annual convention in Colorado Springs. 

He said the award reflects well on Fordham, which he said has “some of the most talented student veterans in the entire country.”

“My accomplishments are one of many stories that are found on campus,” he said.

‘An Example for Others’

Lucenti spent more than two decades serving his country in the military—but launched into a whole new career of service when he came to Fordham.

He was a constant presence in the University’s Office of Military and Veterans Services, volunteering at events and helping other student vets. Last May, he took part in Fordham’s Global Outreach program, chaperoning a trip to El Paso, Texas, where he and other students learned about immigration issues. He was active in Fordham’s SVA chapter, and plans to stay involved as an adviser to future student vets—even though he finished his political science degree at Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies in December.

Matthew Butler, PCS ’17, Fordham’s senior director of military and veterans’ services, said Lucenti “exemplifies the best of our student veterans and is an example for others to follow” because of his leadership and dedication. 

‘Never More Nervous’

Lucenti is a New York City native whose mother, then named Larnice Thompson—his “greatest drill instructor,” he said—was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Education in the 1990s.

He roamed the hallways at the Lincoln Center campus as a teenager, and Fordham was his “dream school,” but he still felt trepidation upon entering its classrooms for the first time a few decades later.

He had spent 24 years in the Navy, serving in combat zones, working at the Pentagon, rising high in the enlisted ranks, but was “never more nervous” than when he first entered a Fordham classroom, worrying about being “the old guy” in class.

But instead, “I felt like my experiences were appreciated and celebrated by many of the professors,” as well as students, he said. “A lot of the public policy that we were studying—I actually lived that history.”

‘The Dream College Experience’

His academic achievements and SVA involvement “put me in circles with people who were like-minded, but very driven, very focused, and very much engaged in the Fordham community,” he said. “At 44 years old, I had the dream college experience.”

Last year, he was selected as an SVA Leadership Institute Fellow and traveled to Washington, D.C., where he and other fellows got to meet with the secretaries of defense, education, and veterans affairs, as well as First Lady Jill Biden. It was a great opportunity, he said, to advocate for support for veterans and military-connected families. “This isn’t just about veterans, it’s also the spouses and the children, especially children of the fallen,” he said.

A former cybersecurity manager in the Navy, Lucenti has moved on to a master’s degree program at New York University in cybersecurity risk and strategy. 

He praised Fordham’s SVA chapter and the Office of Military and Veterans’ Services for how they help student veterans make the transition to Fordham and harness new opportunities. “Fordham really opened my eyes,” he said. 

That’s the topic of a recent book by Richard Teverson, Ph.D., assistant professor of art history, who puts a spotlight on something that tends to be overlooked in histories of conquering powers: the hopes and dreams of the conquered.

Studying such “past futures” is growing more popular in the humanities and social sciences, said Teverson, author of Visions of the Future in Roman Frontier Kingdoms 100 BCE–100 CE, published in September by Routledge. “You can’t get a full picture of a decision that someone makes in the past,” he said, “unless you have a sense of what they thought could happen.”

Teverson gained this sense by examining public art created during the empire’s expansion. He got the idea for the book from his students—when they wrote in a midterm exam about the imagined futures reflected in the Arch of Constantine in Rome, he decided to apply this idea at the former empire’s edge and beyond it, to structures created by people who later came under Roman rule.

Nations or groups being taken over deserve to have their aspirations understood rather than being told to simply “get on board” with their new ruler’s vision, he said. 

“Even people who you might think are on the losing side of history have a future that they’re envisaging and, especially if it’s no longer feasible in some way, are engaged in a really complicated idea about how to fit their aspirations to reality,” he said.

Protecting Rights Through Art

In 14 BCE, as Alpine tribes were falling to Roman conquest, the local ruler Cottius made a deal with the Romans to absorb his kingdom into the empire and remain as magistrate.

To proclaim the new order, he commissioned an archway that, Teverson argues, was designed with the future in mind: As opposed to the Romans’ usual depictions of peacemaking, which might show a vanquished barbarian kissing the hand of a Roman general, the arch contains a relief of Cottius shaking hands with the Roman emperor Augustus.

It also shows tribes receiving citizenship tablets—a way of codifying certain rights and privileges in case they were later challenged, Teverson argues. “This seems, to me, pretty direct in its aspirations and its concern for documenting a ritual of political transfer,” he said.

‘A Divinely Ordained Future’

Another example comes from Kommagene, in modern-day Turkey, a kingdom conquered by Rome in 17 CE. Before that, as wars involving Rome and other powers clouded the kingdom’s future, its ruler, Antiochos I, built a hilltop complex containing icons and images meant to convey a glorious destiny for the kingdom.

That was also his goal, Teverson argues, when the king took the unusual step of including an engraving of his own horoscope so that worshippers would compare it with the night sky and be reminded, “‘Oh, we are working in a kingdom that has a divinely ordained future,’” he said.

Crafting ‘the Futures They Need to Survive’

Through this and other stories of artistic expression, Teverson illustrates how people “craft the futures they need to survive” in the face of uncertainty about what’s coming. It’s an idea that resonates from ancient Rome to today’s marginalized communities who may have a picture of their own future in mind—but face strong headwinds in making it a reality, he said. 

An example might be city planners envisioning a future for a neighborhood—like Harlem, where Teverson lives—without consulting with the residents, he said. “If you want to understand the problems of Harlem, you need to, in some ways, ask yourself, well, what does Harlem think its future is going to be?” 

While writing the book, he was thinking of the looming problem of climate change and the questions that future generations might ask about the future we’re trying to shape today.

“Maybe even in my daughter’s lifetime,” he said, “they’re going to look back and [say], what were you planning in 2024?”

During Friday’s episode, in the category of “New York Colleges,” host Ken Jennings read out the prompt, hewing to the show’s inversion of the usual question-and-answer format: “In 2022 Tania Tetlow became the first layperson and the first woman to be president of this Jesuit university founded in the Bronx.”

The winning response—“What is Fordham?”—came from contestant Enzo Cunanan, a Cambridge University graduate student from Orlando, Florida.

Alex Trebek, Friend of Fordham

Billed as “America’s favorite quiz show,” Jeopardy! has aired in its current form since 1984, hosted for most of that time by Trebek, who died in 2020 at age 80 following a struggle with pancreatic cancer. He and his wife, Jean Trebek, had established a scholarship fund at Fordham, and they both received the Fordham Founder’s Award less than a year before his passing. Alex Trebek was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University in 2011.

The Trebeks’ scholarship is for students who come from East Harlem or Harlem, where their son, Matthew Trebek, FCRH ’13, runs a Mexican restaurant. In 2021, Matthew donated his late father’s wardrobe to a nonprofit that helps men coming back from homelessness and other struggles.

Alex Trebek said he was inspired to create a Fordham scholarship because of how his son’s Fordham education developed his intellect and leadership abilities and helped him become more well-rounded. “My hope for this scholarship,” Alex Trebek said in 2015, “is that it helps many other deserving students have that same transformational experience.”

“He is Fordham Lincoln Center,” said Elizabeth A. “Betty” Burns, FCLC ’83, a Fordham trustee fellow and one of many speakers at the event who lauded Father Grimes, dean of the college from 1998 to 2018. “Bob, thank you for all you’ve done for this school.” (See related story on the dedication ceremony.)

The fundraising effort behind the creation of the five practice rooms, which opened to students this year, was full of heartfelt gifts. Many came from the members of Father Grimes’ former advisory board, including Burns, as well as members of his family.

Fordham Trustee Kim B. Bepler, who attended the event, donated a Steinway piano for one of the practice rooms. And the rooms themselves were named for other donors—including Burns as well as Margitta Rose, a FCLC ’87, a longtime benefactor of the college and former advisory board member who supported the project because of “my great admiration for Father Grimes” as well as their shared love of music.

“Music, more than any other art form, reaches you at a level that … you can’t even express,” she said.

Love for music also motivated Maria del Pilar Ocasio-Douglas, FCRH ’88, and her husband, Gary J. Douglas, to support the project. Music is a creative outlet for both of them, and for their son, James, a Fordham junior majoring in film, who taught himself piano during the coronavirus pandemic, she said.

When told about the project, she loved the idea of “giving the students a place where they can play, not be heard, and really pour themselves into it,” she said.

‘A Significant Space’

Rose also lauded the efforts of Father Grimes’ successor, former FCLC dean Laura Auricchio, Ph.D., who initiated the music rooms’ creation, and spearheaded the fundraising, soon after coming to Fordham in 2019.

Dedicated music practice rooms were “a must-have,” said Auricchio, who attended the event. It was her idea to name them for Father Grimes—because “there were a lot of people … who felt that he deserved to have a significant space devoted to him,” said Auricchio, now vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The naming also made sense because of Father Grimes’ music background, she said. An ethnomusicologist by training, he is a tenor soloist who sang for decades with the Fordham University Chorus, Bronx Arts Ensemble, and other organizations.

Setting the Tone at Lincoln Center

One donor, Delia Peters, FCLC ’85, longtime chair of Father Grimes’ former advisory board, recalled how Father Grimes set a friendly and happy tone at the college—in part, through his personal attention to students.

“I liked his style of ‘deaning,’” said Peters, who played a key role in reaching out to donors for the music rooms. “I would be walking with him down a hallway, and he would know every student’s name. And whatever was needed, he somehow found the money to fund it.”

In an interview, Father Grimes, a 1975 alumnus of Fordham College at Rose Hill, said he was “absolutely amazed” by Fordham College at Lincoln Center soon after arriving there as a music professor, and “started dreaming about the possibilities of what might be.”

When he became dean, he did whatever he could to “prompt and encourage” others—along with raising funds—to realize those possibilities, he said..

The results included the creation of an early set of music practice rooms; the Franny’s Space rehearsal space and Veronica Lally Kehoe Theatre; a faculty and student exchange program with the nearby Juilliard School; and the Fordham College at Lincoln Center Chamber Orchestra, among many other initiatives in the arts arena alone.

“It’s quite an honor” to be the namesake for the new music suite, he said. “And Fordham College Lincoln Center is very, very close to my heart. I loved my time there. And so if I’ve left a little of my sense there, I’m very happy for that.”

Lead supporters of the Robert R. Grimes, S.J. Music Studios project:

Kay Yun, PAR, and Andre Neumann-Loreck, PAR 
Maria del Pilar Ocasio-Douglas, FCRH ’88, and Gary J. Douglas
Margitta Rose, FCLC ’87
Mark Luis Villamar, GABELLI ’69, and wife Esther Milstead
Elizabeth A. Burns, FCLC ’83
The Grimes Family
Patricia A. Dugan Perlmuth, FCLC ’79
Delia L. Peters, FCLC ’85

Attendees included music students, music and art faculty members, donors who supported the project, Fordham President Tania Tetlow, and Father Grimes himself, as well as members of his family. (See related story about the fundraising effort.) They gathered at the Lincoln Center campus outside the Robert R. Grimes, S.J. Music Studios, which opened this fall, providing students with five soundproof rooms designed to enhance their music practice.

Related story: Student musicians began the academic year on a high note when the music studios opened. (With video)

Speakers took turns thanking donors and lauding Father Grimes, a former Fordham music professor and a singer himself.

“You have been always a supporter of the arts here, whether that meant the [Ailey/Fordham BFA in Dance program], the theater program, visual arts, and of course the music program,” said Daniel Ott, D.M.A., associate professor of music and chair of the Department of Art History and Music.

Students Finding Their Musical Voice

The gathering took place in the Lipani Gallery, part of a newly renovated visual arts complex adjacent to the five new music practice rooms. In her remarks, Tetlow spoke of “how profoundly Jesuit music is” because of its mix of intellect and passion.

“Know, for all of you who gave to this project, that you are creating a space where every day, Fordham students … are going to literally find their voice and discover what they have to say to the world, and that will be true for the rest of their lives, so thank you so much.”

Father Grimes thanked the donors as well, and said he was “so happy for the students to have something that is so important to any music program.”

In an interview before the event, he said “it’s quite an honor” to be the namesake for the new music suite. “Fordham College Lincoln Center is very, very close to my heart,” he said. “I loved my time there. And so if I’ve left a little of my sense there, I’m very happy for that.”

‘We Need Artists’

The event was emceed by Maco Dacanay, a junior and a music major.

“In this world that we all live in, not only do we need artists, but we need people who are willing to put in the work to become their best selves for the sake of the community,” he said. “These practice rooms grant us the space to put in that work, and for that, I am beyond grateful.”

The five rooms range from smaller rooms for individual practice to larger spaces for ensembles. Their features include recording capability and virtual acoustic environments so that students can hear how they would sound in a cathedral, concert hall, or other settings, Ott said. He noted that the rooms—open 8 a.m. to midnight—are available to all students, not just music majors.

A student group called the Lincoln Center Jazz Ensemble provided background music. Another group of student musicians performed Haydn’s String Quartet in D Major, to applause and cheers. “That just made my day,” Father Grimes said after their performance.

Vincent DeCola, S.J., an assistant dean in the Gabelli School of Business, spoke last, giving a blessing of the new space. “No doubt, we each have experienced the divine in listening to the particular music which enlivens our spirits,” he said.

But before that, he brought the house down with some singing of his own, “with apologies to Misters Gilbert and Sullivan”—an adaptation of the song He Is an Englishman, with lyrics tailored to Father Grimes.

Its title? “He Is a Fordham Ram.”

“I’m grateful that they gave me a shot to come here,” said Bernard Anderson, a mixer at Greyston. “[When I] came here,” Anderson said, “I stopped going to jail.”

He and other employees who have flourished at Greyston tell its story in a documentary recently co-produced by Gabelli School of Business professor Michael Pirson, Ph.D. It’s the latest outgrowth of research by him and his colleagues about how businesses can succeed by tuning in to their employees’ humanity.

Addressing the Great Resignation

Key to this approach is promoting employees’ dignity, according to an Oct. 30 Harvard Business Review article co-authored by Pirson, Gabelli School professor Ayse Yemiscigil, Ph.D., and Donna Hicks, Ph.D., an associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The article describes how to lead an organization with dignity—by defining it clearly, recognizing people’s inherent value, and acknowledging dignity violations, among other things. The goal is creating workspaces “where people feel seen and heard, and where they can collaborate at the next level” because of it, said Pirson, the James A. F. Stoner Endowed Chair in Global Sustainability at the Gabelli School.

Yemiscigil said it’s an urgent topic because of the so-called Great Resignation and “the epidemic of low employee engagement.”

“There are all sorts of indicators showing that the way that we manage and lead organizations is not working for the majority of people,” she said.

Creating a dignity culture, Pirson and Yemiscigil said, involves such things as listening to understand people, acknowledging employees as whole human beings, and giving employees a greater voice in the organization. “It doesn’t take long” for this culture to take hold if there’s enough intention and commitment, Pirson said.

Inspired by Sesame Street

Helping companies make this shift is the idea behind the documentaries Pirson started co-producing about four years ago after he happened to meet some of the (human) cast members of Sesame Street through a Gabelli School connection. Inspired by the show’s emphasis on human potential, he set out to feature companies that exemplify humanistic management, working with co-producer Alison Bartlett, a writer, director, and Emmy-nominated actress who was a Sesame Street cast member.

His second short film, Zen Brownie, focuses on Greyston Bakery, a supplier of Ben & Jerry’s founded in 1982 by Bernie Glassman, a physicist and Buddhist monk. (One of Glassman’s friends, Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges, narrates.) The bakery’s dignity-based open hiring policy creates “a virtuous cycle of trustworthiness,” Pirson says in the film. “Trust that you place in other people typically gets trust back” and often inspires the recipient to want to live up to that, he says.

Studying Student Behavior

His team has shown the documentaries at film festivals; they’re looking for a distributor and planning a few more films. He and Yemiscigil are also working on studies, soon to be submitted to the Journal of Business Ethics, that show how dignity can boost employees’ motivation and engagement as well as teams’ performance. Some of their findings come from a study of 800 Gabelli School students preparing for a consulting competition, working in teams.

Dignity is important not only for companies but for society because it frees us to think more about large-scale problems, Pirson said, giving climate change as an example.

Without “dignity wounds” occupying our minds, he said, “we move from a defensiveness into a space of abundance where we can create, and that is what’s necessary for our species to actually survive.”

That’s according to a study co-authored by Fordham economics professor Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., and researchers in health-related fields at other universities. It shows that after four decades in which inflation stayed low and didn’t pose a serious problem in America, the mental health impacts of its spike in the past few years are ripe for study, Mitra said.

“That’s an open field in terms of research,” she said. “We know … that unemployment has very detrimental effects on mental health, and that a job loss can lead to depression and other negative mental health outcomes.” Inflation has received less study, but seems to be “a very important potential determinant of well-being, including mental health,” she said.

The study also suggests that positive economic news, like a low unemployment rate, may be “insufficient in terms of telling us about how people feel about the economy,” she said.

The High Price of Milk

The study, based on data about 71,000 working-age adults, was published earlier this year in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The researchers used information from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, begun during the coronavirus pandemic, which collects data about how households are affected by various social and economic issues.

Their study focused on respondents who told the Census Bureau about their stress level caused by price increases. It compared these stress levels in mid-September 2022, when the inflation rate was 8.2%, with levels in June 2023, when inflation had dropped to the closer-to-normal rate of 3%. Despite the decline, the share of respondents who were very or moderately stressed by inflation increased, going from 77% to 79%.

The increase, Mitra said, suggests that a short-term measurement like the inflation rate might not reflect the cumulative stress caused by rising prices. People’s belt-tightening measures can include canceling subscriptions, cutting back on utilities, delaying medical treatments, and working additional jobs, the study notes.

And even if the inflation rate drops, prices are still “a lot higher than what they were a couple of years ago,” she said. “The price of a gallon of milk is not what it used to be in 2020.”

Impact of Job Losses, Long COVID

Mitra also noted that stress due to inflation is worse for those whose income is cut, whether from a job loss or a case of long COVID-19. Among other findings, the study found stress levels increased more among certain groups, including less educated adults and women in general, for instance.

The study calls for policies to address “the complexity of stress responses” stemming from societal challenges like the pandemic and the inflation that followed it—a combination of problems seen “never before in the history of the U.S.,” the study says. The study also points to the need for adding inflation adjustments to government benefits and tax credits—such as the child tax credit—that promote people’s economic security, Mitra said.

She looks forward to future studies with her cross-disciplinary group, which includes researchers from the social work school at Rutgers, the Penn State Cancer Institute, the University of North Texas Health Science Center, West Virginia University’s department of dental public health, and JPS Health Network in Fort Worth. “We share an interest [in]the relation between economic insecurity and health,” she said.