Latham, an associate professor of history, joined the Fordham faculty in 1996. He is a noted scholar of American foreign relations and 20th century American political and intellectual history.

“Dr. Latham is highly regarded by his peers as an accomplished scholar, superior administrator and supportive colleague,” said Stephen Freedman, Ph.D., senior vice president/chief academic officer and professor of natural science at Fordham. “He is a gifted teacher and an experienced faculty leader who understands and is deeply committed to supporting and promoting the University’s mission.”

Presently the chair of the tenure and reappointment appeals committee, Latham has worked on the executive committee of the faculty senate and the committee on salary and benefits. He brings more than a decade of experience in University governance to the role of interim dean.

Latham accepted the dean’s position following the departure of Brennan O’Donnell, Ph.D., who was named president of Manhattan College this week. Latham assumes his new duties on July 1, 2009.

“Fordham College at Rose Hill is a terrific institution,” Latham said. “It is not only a top-flight academic institution, attracting truly excellent students, but it’s also a place that has a profound sense of mission and a deep commitment to community service.”

Among his goals for the college, Latham said he aims to work collaboratively with faculty to strengthen opportunities in undergraduate research and international education.

“We’re an outstanding liberal arts college in one of the world’s great cities,” he said. “We need to promote and expand international opportunities for our students. It’s vital in any academic field, and vital in any career or profession that students may want to pursue.”

Latham also plans to further promote the Saint Edmund Campion Institute in the life of the college and augment integrated learning communities, unique programs in which students with similar academic interests share classes, living space and outside activities.

“I want all of our students to be aware of the Campion Institute and aspire to the level of academic excellence that would make them candidates for prestigious awards,” Latham said.

“Likewise, our integrated learning communities have been a tremendous success. That’s one of the things that Brennan O’Donnell put in place that he has done a fabulous job with, and that I’d like to see expand.”

Latham said he will continue to participate in academic conferences, and eventually hopes to integrate teaching into his duties as dean.

“I’m very happy in the classroom and, quite frankly, it’s been a real source of satisfaction for me,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to let go of it completely because I am constantly refreshed by our students.”

Latham earned a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College, and master’s and doctoral degrees in history from the University of California at Los Angeles.

Latham is the author of Modernization as Ideology:  American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000).  His forthcoming book, Imposing Modernity: The United States, Development, and the Postcolonial World from the Cold War to the Present will be published by Cornell University Press. He is also a co-editor of two scholarly volumes and has written 10 articles that have appeared in respected journals and edited collections in the field.

“We are very pleased that Dr. Latham will be stepping up to the dean’s chair at Fordham College at Rose Hill,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of the University. “Having been the dean of the college, I believe Fordham will be well served by Dr. Latham’s considerable scholarship and administrative and teaching experience.”

Opened by Archbishop John Hughes more than 160 years ago and entrusted to the care of the Jesuits in 1846, Fordham College at Rose Hill was the first Catholic institution of higher learning in the Northeast. The college is located on the second largest green campus in New York City and is the academic home to roughly 3,334 undergraduates. The Jesuit tradition is characterized by excellence in teaching and by the care and development of each student.

Engel, editor-in-chief of the student newspaperThe Ram, was the 16th recipient of the award. The scholarship is given annually to a student who embodies the spirit of Walsh, who was Fordham’s Patterson Professor of Journalism and a longtime faculty advisor to The Ram.

“I feel like I’m at the Oscars,” said Engel, who was toasted by Brennan O’Donnell, Ph.D., dean of FCRH, and two of Walsh’s students. “I know that the world of communications is vast and that the skills I’ve learned in this major will be useful no matter which career path I follow.”

Engel, who rose quickly through ranks at The Ram from writer to assistant news editor to executive board member to editor-in-chief, recounted her childhood as a “bookworm,” and as someone who “wanted to leave my mark on the world of communications.” She said that an internship at Comcast Networks in advertising sales this summer opened her eyes to the myriad of career possibilities in the field.

O’Donnell lauded Engel not only for her community and newspaper work, but for her “absolutely gaudy GPA” of 3.91 and her induction into Phi Beta Kappa.

“To be in her presence for even a few minutes is to see that she has what it takes to thrive in the world she’ll be entering next year,” he said. “It won’t take her long to rise to the very top in whatever she chooses to do.”

Former students of Walsh created the scholarship and many attend the annual luncheon. The scholarship is one of the University’s highest awarded to a senior majoring in communication and media studies.

In attendance were four former editors of The Ram, including former Walsh students and scholarship committee members Warren Spellman (FRCH ’56) and Frank Corbin (FCRH ’50).

Corbin said that his mentor Walsh would have been “pleased” to present the award to Engel.

“Ed Walsh left us with a wonderful maxim that is the synthesis of communications,” he told Engel. “It’s keep in touch.”

Engel is also the winner of the 2007 New York Women in Communications Foundation scholarship for excellence in communications. In addition to Comcast Networks, Engel has interned at ABC News Good Morning America and Hunter Public Relations.

The two-second soundbite seems to leap out and express something essential. Some make a connection between having a “ways to go” and the core curriculum, specifically about how the core opens students’ minds to the astonishing depth and breadth of human knowledge, teaching them that there is always more to know. Others talk about making similar discoveries about the limits of their knowledge through intense work in their majors, especially through directed research projects and senior thesis work. And many students note how courses, in combination with community service or global outreach experiences, taught them to recognize their own preconceptions and prejudices and spurred them to commit themselves to the hard task of reaching out in solidarity across artificial boundaries of class, race, ethnicity and religion.

In the last few weeks of the spring semester, I found myself thinking about the student with “a ways to go” as I pursued my favorite occupation at that time of year—going to awards banquets to celebrate the accomplishments of the senior class. At each of these events I heard wonderful talks and testimonials but one of these talks seems to me to have gotten it just right. At the Community Service Awards ceremony, Sister Barbara Lenniger, who serves as executive director of two Bronx facilities that assist homeless mothers, began her talk simply: “Thank you,” she said, “for your hopefulness.”

Hopefulness. That’s the quality (or more precisely the virtue) that accounts for the resonance of the soundbite. The phrase “I have a ways to go” is in fact what the late Jesuit scholar and former Fordham professor William Lynch, S.J., would call an “image of hope.” It is an imaginative expression that encapsulates in compact form a whole set of assumptions. To picture yourself as someone with “a ways to go” implies that you think of your life as a journey, that you know that to be human means that you are necessarily pitched toward a future. Such an image, of course, has deep roots in the traditions of Christian humanism that inform the Catholic university and relates to notions of the human being as wayfarer, pilgrim or even exile, the homo viator whose true home is elsewhere and whose heart, as St. Augustine says, is restless until it rests in God.

Recently, Professor Cathleen Kaveny of Notre Dame has argued that “the most urgent task of a Catholic college—and especially of a Jesuit college in our time and place—is to nurture the virtue of hope . . . and to serve as a beacon of hope to the broader community.” She argues that, especially in these deeply troubled times, when injustice, entrenched poverty, epidemic disease, seemingly ceaseless war and the threat of environmental catastrophe make it so difficult not to lapse into hopelessness, “it is the task of a Jesuit college to educate for hope.”

The hope discussed here is nothing like the easy optimism or simple belief in some mechanical force of progress that often masquerades as hope. For St. Thomas Aquinas hope is, by definition, focused on things that are difficult; it is a virtue that takes as its object a “future good, difficult but possible to attain.” Each of hope’s chief enemies, presumption and despair, functions primarily as a distortion of the real difficulty posed by real-world problems: presumption underestimates difficulty, substituting reductive analyses and quick fixes for patient and realistic work; despair inflates the power of difficulty, mistaking it for impossibility.

The virtue of hope is vital, I think, both to the intellectual mission of the Jesuit university and to its commitment to service beyond the university. The intellectual mission asserts that it is possible to seek the truth that integrates the academic disciplines even while paying full attention to the multiplicity of truths that are refracted through the full range of disciplinary lenses. This, after all, is the implicit argument of our core curriculum—that it is hard, but not impossible (we hope) to discern unity in multiplicity, that truth is worth the effort to pursue, even when we know we’ll always have “a ways to go.” Hope is also the virtue that allows us to persevere, no matter how many times our efforts meet with disappointment, in our efforts to redress injustice, alleviate suffering or increase the reign of peace in the world. Indeed, as the philosopher Joseph Pieper writes, it is hope that allows us to see our disappointments not as failures (or merely as failures), but, to the contrary, as steps in a necessary process of disillusion that brings us ever closer to seeing the real nature of intractable human problems, a process that ends in the wisdom that tells us we cannot effect any real or lasting change alone. We must, in other words, be men and women for and with others, if we have (or are to have) any hope at all.

So I am inspired to think that my student focus group—and Sister Barbara—have it right: that a key distinguishing characteristic of students who graduate from Fordham College at Rose Hill is their hopefulness, and that deep and realistic hope is the chief gift that the Class of 2007 is bringing into the world. I know that such an assessment squares with my own sense of the class, which has shown its keen intelligence and its great and restless heart in countless ways, through academic accomplishment, through the tireless service that its members have performed, and through the spirit of confident humility that I’ve seen expressed over and over in the young men and women of this class whom it has been my great privilege to come to know. If it is indeed true thatyou are leaving here in hope and as a beacon of hope to others, then we may be forgiven, I hope, if we take a moment to congratulate ourselves on work well done—as long as we wake up tomorrow back on the path with a renewed sense that we all have a “ways to go.”

Editor’s Note: This column is adapted from Dean O’Donnell’s valedictory speech at the Encaeniaceremony in May.

The “Sapientia et Doctrina” section of Inside Fordham features first-person columns written by members of the Fordham Jesuit community and University faculty. Our Jesuit correspondents offer essays on teaching and learning from a Jesuit perspective, or focus on some aspect of scholarship as seen through the lens of Jesuit tradition. Faculty correspondents write on an academic topic: their own academic specialty or current research; or an aspect of scholarship, written for the lay person. The two types of columns alternate by issue.

For more information, please contact the editor, Victor Inzunza, at (212) 636-7576, [email protected].

In his talk to the seniors (who were recommended by Fordham College at Rose Hill faculty), Miller emphasized the ongoing application of undergraduate knowledge and communication through strong writing skills—skills he has used to become chairman and managing director of Miller Buckfire, which he co-founded in 2002. He has also been the managing director of restructuring groups at Salomon Brothers and Prudential Securities in New York City and is a trustee of Save the Children.

The Executive-in-Residence program, an initiative spearheaded by the President’s Council, a 100-plus-member group of the University’s brightest and most accomplished alumni, brings top graduates back to campus to teach classes, meet with students and ultimately strengthen alumni’s relationships with Fordham. Miller also serves on the Fordham College at Rose Hill Board of Visitors, the dean’s advisory board, composed of distinguished alumni of the College.

After his talk, Miller met with the students and reviewed their resumes in one-on-one mentoring sessions. The event concluded with a lunch with Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham; Dean O’Donnell;  and Al Checcio, vice president for development and university relations.

A Century of Media, A Century of War (Peter Lang, 2006) is about the history of struggle between war and its representation, and how that struggle has changed the way war is fought and the way war is portrayed. The event is hosted by the Peace and Justice Studies Program; Brennan O’Donnell, Ph.D., dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill; Robert Grimes, S.J., dean of Fordham College at Lincoln Center; and Peter Lang Publishing.